From the acclaimed author of Wintering: a thrilling ode to the spirit of adventure and the vagaries of loss and loveIn 1897, Odd Einar Eide returns home from a near-death experience in the Arctic only to discover his own funeral underway. His wife, Inger, stunned to see him alive, is slow to warm back up to him, having spent many sleepless nights convinced she had lost both him and their daughter, Thea, who traveled to America two years earlier but has yet to send even a single letter back to them in Hammerfest, their small Norwegian town at the top of the earth.More than a century later, Greta Nansen has finally begun to admit to herself that her marriage is over. Desperately unhappy and unfulfilled, she makes the decision to follow her husband from their home in Minnesota to Oslo, where he has traveled for work, to end it once and for all. But on impulse, for reasons unknown even to her, she diverts her travels to Hammerfest: the town of her ancestors, the...

A writer and former ski jumper facing a terminal diagnosis takes one more leap—into a past of soaring flights and broken family bonds A brilliant ski jumper has to be fearless—Jon Bargaard remembers this well. His memories of daring leaps and risks might be the key to the book he's always wanted to write: a novel about his family, beginning with Pops, once a champion ski jumper himself, who also took Jon and his younger brother Anton to the heights. But Jon has never been able to get past the next, ruinous episode of their history, and now that he has received a terrible diagnosis, he's afraid he never will.In a bravura performance, Peter Geye follows Jon deep into the past he tried so hard to leave behind, telling the story he spent his life escaping. It begins with a flourish, his father and his hard-won sweetheart fleeing Chicago, and a notoriously ruthless gangster, to land in North Minneapolis. That, at least, was the tale Jon heard, one...

On the rocky shores of Lake Superior, a piercing story of selfhood and determinism develops: is the future what we're handed or what we make of it? It's 1910, and Theodulf Sauer has finally achieved a position befitting his ego: master lighthouse keeper at a newly commissioned station towering above Lake Superior. When his new wife, Willa, arrives on the first spring ferry, it's clear her life has taken the opposite turn: after being summoned home from college to Duluth when her father dies, she and her scheming mother find themselves destitute, and Willa is rushed into this ill-suited arranged marriage before she can comprehend her fate. As the lighthouse station establishes, the new relationship teeters between tense and hostile, with little mutual understanding or tenderness. Willa takes solace in her learned fascination with the cosmos, especially (despite her husband's suspicion of the event) in viewing the imminent Halley's Comet. Under...

Against the wilds of sea and wood, a young immigrant woman settles into life outside Duluth in the 1890s, still shocked at finding herself alone in a new country, abandoned and adrift; in the early 1920s, her orphan son, now grown, falls in love with the one woman he shouldn’t and uses his best skills to build them their own small ark to escape. But their pasts travel with them, threatening to capsize even their fragile hope. In this triumphant new novel, Peter Geye has crafted another deeply moving tale of a misbegotten family shaped by the rough landscape in which they live—often at the mercy of wildlife and weather—and by the rough edges of their own breaking hearts.

An exceptional and acclaimed writer joins Knopf with his third novel, far and away his most masterful book yet. There are two stories in play here, bound together when the elderly, demented Harry Eide escapes his sickbed and vanishes into the forbidding northernmost Minnesota wilderness that surrounds the town of Gunflint--instantly changing the Eide family, and many other lives, forever. He'd done this once before, thirty-some years earlier, in 1963, fleeing a crumbling marriage and bringing along Gustav, his eighteen-year-old son, pitching this audacious, potentially fatal scheme to him--winter already coming on, in these woods, on these waters--as a reenactment of the ancient voyageurs' journeys of discovery. It's certainly a journey Gus has never forgotten. Now--with his father pronounced dead--he relates its every detail to Berit Lovig, who'd waited nearly thirty years for Harry, her passionate conviction finally fulfilled for the last two decades. So, a...

Set against the powerful lakeshore landscape of northern Minnesota, Safe from the Sea is a heartfelt novel in which a son returns home to reconnect with his estranged and dying father thirty-five years after the tragic wreck of a Great Lakes ore boat that the father only partially survived and that has divided them emotionally ever since. When his father for the first time finally tells the story of the horrific disaster he has carried with him so long, it leads the two men to reconsider each other. Meanwhile, Noah s own struggle to make a life with an absent father has found its real reward in his relationship with his sagacious wife, Natalie, whose complications with infertility issues have marked her husband s life in ways he only fully realizes as the reconciliation with his father takes shape. Peter Geye has delivered an archetypal story of a father and son, of the tug and pull of family bonds, of Norwegian immigrant culture, of dramatic shipwrecks and the business and...