About the Book
A highly acclaimed novelist now gives us a true epic: a love story that spans sixty years, generations' worth of feuds, and secrets withheld and revealed.
The two principal stories at play in Wintering are bound together when the elderly, demented Harry Eide escapes his sickbed and vanishes into the forbidding, northernmost wilderness that surrounds the town of Gunflint, Minnesota--instantly changing the Eide family, and many other lives, forever. He'd done this once before, more than thirty years earlier in 1963, fleeing a crumbling marriage and bringing along Gustav, his eighteen-year-old son, pitching this audacious, potentially fatal scheme--winter already coming on, in these woods, on these waters--as a reenactment of the ancient voyageurs' journeys of discovery.
It's certainly something Gus has never forgotten, nor the Devil's Maw of a river, a variety of beloved (possibly fantastical) maps, the ice floes and waterfalls (neither especially appealing from a canoe), a magnificent bear, the endless portages, a magical abandoned shack, Thanksgiving and Christmas improvised at the far end of the earth, the brutal cold and sheer beauty of it all. And men hunting other men.
Now--with his father pronounced dead--Gus relates their adventure in vivid detail to Berit Lovig, who'd spent much of her life waiting for Harry, her passionate conviction finally fulfilled over the last two decades. So, a middle-aged man rectifying his personal history, an aging lady wrestling with her own and with the entire saga of a town and region they'd helped to form and were in turn relentlessly, unforgettably formed by.
About the Author :
Peter Geye received his MFA from the University of New Orleans and his PhD from Western Michigan University, where he was editor of Third Coast. He was born and raised in Minneapolis and still lives there with his wife and children. He is the author of multiple award-winning novels.
Suzanne Toren, award-winning narrator, has over thirty years of experience in narration. She was named a "Golden Voice" by AudioFile magazine in 2019. She has won the American Foundation for the Blind's Scourby Award for Narrator of the Year, AudioFile magazine named her the 2009 Best Voice in Nonfiction & Culture, and she is the recipient of multiple Earphones Awards. She performs on and off Broadway and in regional theaters and has appeared on Law & Order and in various soap operas.
Review :
"A page-turning cross between Jack London's naturalism and Jim Harrison's poetic symbolism...[Stitches] together two frequently dissociated strands in American literature: its dramas of beset manhood and its domestic chronicles...Wintering gives us both, vividly imagining an outward bound journey that eventually brings us home to a fuller understanding of ourselves."
-- "Milwaukee Journal Sentinel"
"An elegant, quietly profound, and harrowing novel. I loved this book."
-- "Emily St. John Mandel, New York Times bestselling author"
"Beautifully written [and] supported by immaculately conceived characters [and] Geye's instinctive sense of narrative movement...The relatively small and enclosed community is Geye's perfect laboratory for exploring human nature."
-- "Booklist"
"Geye has chosen a complex narrative strategy, one that mirrors the complexity of the relationships he dramatizes...Reminiscent of Jack London's 'To Build a Fire' and Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, Geye's narrative takes us deep into both human and natural wilderness."
-- "Kirkus Reviews"
"Geye's assured narrative gradually unfolds a Jack London-like tale of survival blended with a Richard Russo-like picture of small-town intrigue...Geye dips into history with ease and comes out with a story as contemporary as anything flashing across our screens today. Wintering is a novel for the ages."
-- "Shelf Awareness"
"Geye's powerful third outing journeys to the frozen places in the American landscape and the human heart...Capturing the strength and mystery of characters who seem inextricable from the landscape, Geye's novel is an unsentimental testament to the healing that's possible when we confront our bleakest places."
-- "Publishers Weekly"
"In one beautifully etched sentence after another, Peter Geye's Wintering explores the remote wilderness of Minnesota, and the even more remote and mysterious wilderness of family history. I found myself lost inside it, in all the best ways a reader can be lost."
-- "Alix Ohlin, author of Inside"
"In starkly elegant prose that matches neatly the deep northern landscape in which it's set, Wintering is a vivid portrait of fathers and sons, generational battles of love and exhaustion, forgiveness and mystery. The bonds crack, shimmer, and hold, like ice, like granite ledges. Peter Geye writes with a nigh-mythic force. An extraordinary novel."
-- "Jeffrey Lent, author of A Peculiar Grace"
"Peter Geye's third novel is a work of great power and primal beauty, an epic literary journey into the forbidding wilds of Northern Minnesota. Geye is a masterful writer whose elegiac prose captures both the holiness and brutality of nature. Wintering is a stunning book, one that takes hold of the reader from the first haunting line and never lets go."
-- "Amy Greene, bestselling author of Bloodroot"
"The last time I read a literary thriller so profound Cormac McCarthy's name was on its spine. But Peter Geye is his own man and Wintering is as unique and menacingly beautiful as its Minnesota borderlands setting."
-- "Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author"
"There's a lot to love about this novel: the beauty of the wilderness, the tenderness of relationships, the craft...[There] is the feeling you get at the funeral of a loved one--how you ache to hear the stories you never knew so that you might round out the man...But in the sharing of stories there is healing, if not complete comprehension--and that, it seems to me, is the point and triumph of this novel."
-- "Minneapolis Star Tribune"
"There's no greater literary pleasure than watching a master emerge. I've witnessed Peter Geye grow into that distinction for coming on two decades now. All I can say is Wintering proves his finest, most powerful work yet."
-- "Joseph Boyden, award-winning author of Three Day Road"
