Showing results by author "Peter Geye" in All Categories

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. As the lighthouse station establishes, the new relationship teeters between tense and hostile.

In his “finely crafted first novel” ( Booklist), Peter Geye evokes the savage beauty of Lake Superior’s north shore and the bittersweet reunion of a dying father and his hurting son after decades of estrangement. When Noah Torr returns to his family’s Minnesota cabin to reconnect with his father, he learns for the first time what really happened 35 years ago—and how it changed his father forever.

In 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.

The story moves back and forth in time from the arrival of Thea from her isolated village in arctic Norway in search of a new life in the near wilderness of a small town and logging camp on the shore of Lake Superior to the travails of her orphaned son, Odd, some twenty years later. When Thea’s aunt and uncle do not meet her boat as planned, she’s initially left abandoned with no money or prospects and without speaking the language.

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 30 years earlier in 1963, fleeing a crumbling marriage and bringing along Gustav, his 18-year-old son.