Praise for northernmost
“Intricate and beautifully written … The language is lyrical and often poetic, almost sounding as if Mary Shelley herself had come back to describe the frozen north … ” — Urban Waite, San Francisco Chronicle
“Northernmost has something for everyone: history, adventure, romance and spiritual awakening.” — BookPage (Starred)
“One man’s terrifying story of survival in an Arctic wasteland reverberates profoundly in the life of his distant descendant.” — Kirkus (Starred)
“. . . a memorable, powerful tale of endurance and ancestral connection.” — Publishers Weekly
“Northern Norway’s intimidating cold and wilderness is perfectly captured . . .” — Mary Ann Grossmann, St. Paul Pioneer Press
“Peter Geye writes with an almost romantic passion about all things wintry.” — Star Tribune
“... at once an adventure story, a love story, and a dissolution of love story ... ” — Historical Novel Society
“Peter Geye may well be the William Faulkner of the North Country. In Northernmost, the story of two generations in vastly separated times, he paints a stark, gripping landscape in which both survival and love are heart-rending struggles. If you’re concerned that today’s American novels are a wasteland of the mediocre, read Peter Geye. He will restore your faith in the compelling power of fiction. “ —William Kent Krueger, author of This Tender Land
“Northernmost is rich in history, adventure, and love. A study of marriage and family across time and geographies, Peter Geye offers a restrained, emotionally complicated tale of men and women whose lives are lived in the cold expanse of their yearnings and desires. The descriptive language is exquisite. Geye understands the fine balance between who we are born to be and how we birth ourselves across the seasons of our lives.” —Kao Kalia Yang, author of The Song Poet
“Lost in the Arctic, a man struggles to survive, while in Minnesota, five generations later, his great-great-great granddaughter struggles for her soul. How Peter Geye weaves these narratives together is a marvel of storytelling. The Arctic scenes will steal your breath, but the truest beauty here is within, the slow thaw of a frozen human heart learning, again, how to love. My God, what a book. This is why I read, and my question is where has Peter Geye been all my life? Please read this novel. It will freeze and unfreeze you sentence by sentence and leave you at the top of your world.” —Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter
“Northernmost fascinated me with its frozen landscapes and Arctic winters, and it warmed me with the tenderness of its storytelling and humanity of its characters. Peter Geye has written a tremendously satisfying family saga about the tenacity of love amid the unpredictable, ungovernable forces that act on our lives.” —Maggie Shipstead, author of The Great Circle
“We might as well give Peter Geye the Nobel Prize for winter, or declare him the poet laureate of snow. For no other writer so skillfully captures landscapes of glacier and tundra—both their bleakness and their particular beauty. To read him is to feel the ache of a blizzard on your skin. But in Northernmost, he has also given us an exhilarating tale of adventure and love and heartache and faith, a story of overcoming the most trying ordeals imaginable. Partly a tale of heroic survival, partly a meticulously researched history, and partly an epic romance, Northernmost is, most of all, a beautiful, big-hearted, triumphant novel.” —Nathan Hill, author of The Nix
A thrilling ode to both the spirit of adventure and the timeless vagaries of human love
In 1897 Norway, Odd Einar Eide returns home from a near-death experience in the arctic only to discover his funeral in full effect. 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 before and has not sent even one letter back. But just as they are reconnecting, a sensationalist journalist gets wind of Odd Einar’s remarkable tale of survival and invites them to Tromsø so he can properly report on what he is sure will be a bestselling story, complicating Odd Einar and Inger’s reunion further.
In 2017 Minnesota, Greta Nansen has finally begun to admit to herself that her marriage is over. Desperately unhappy and unfulfilled, she makes the decision to leave her children at home with her father and follow her husband, the descendant himself of Norway’s most famous explorer, to Oslo, where he has traveled for work, to end it once and for all. But on impulse she diverts her travels to Hammerfest, the town of her ancestors, the town where her great-great grandmother Thea was born, for reasons unbeknownst to even her.
A dual narrative told by two family members generations apart, Northernmost both confronts the darkest recesses of the human heart and celebrates the remarkable ability for humans survive nearly unimaginable trials.