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Northernmost

A novel

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
ONE OF HOUSTON CHRONICLE'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
From the acclaimed author of Wintering: a thrilling ode to the spirit of adventure and the vagaries of loss and love.
"A beautiful, big-hearted, triumphant novel.”—Nathan Hill, author of The Nix

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.
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, she diverts her travels to Hammerfest: the town of her ancestors, the town where her great-great-grandmother Thea was born—and for some reason never returned to. Braiding together two remarkable stories of love and survival, Northernmost wades into the darkest recesses of the human heart and celebrates the remarkable ability of humans to endure nearly unimaginable trials.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 6, 2020
      Geye’s finely wrought follow-up to Wintering continues his exploration of the Eide family in parallel narratives. Norwegian fisherman Odd Einar Eide makes a treacherous Arctic expedition in 1897. After he is gone for weeks, his neighbors and wife, Inger, assume he is dead, and he returns to his village of Hammerfest just in time to witness his own funeral. A journalist from Tromsø gets wind of Odd’s adventures and convinces him and Inger to travel to Tromsø to record his remarkable story of survival. Greta Nansen, Odd’s modern-day descendent in Minnesota, navigates the difficult terrain of a loveless marriage and pieces together her family history, living in the Minnesota fish house she refurbished that’s been part of the Eide family for generations, where she feels a visceral connection to the harsh winters. She ends up visiting Hammerfest, finding more than just answers about her family’s complex past. Geye captures Odd’s harrowing confrontation with an ice bear and his subsequent soul-searching as he faces the desolation of the Arctic, which is mirrored brilliantly in descriptions of the isolating emotional and psychological turmoil faced by Greta. While Geye stumbles through some chronological inconsistencies, the robust depiction of the bleak and beautiful northern Norway landscape and insightful descriptions of Odd’s and Greta’s inner lives are consistently impressive. This is a memorable, powerful tale of endurance and ancestral connection. Agent: Jesseca Salky, Salky Literary Management.

    • Booklist

      April 1, 2020
      Geye pairs a nineteenth-century arctic survival story and a modern recovery-from-divorce narrative, fleshing out a family's history and exploring overlapping themes of isolation and resilience. Seal hunter Odd Einar Eide is stranded on the tundra. All that keeps him alive is a knife, a pair of inherited boots, and memories of his wife, Inger, and their daughter, Thea, who hasn't been heard from since she emigrated to America. More than a century later, middle-aged Minnesotan Greta Nansen seeks refuge from a capsized marriage. Odd Einar grapples with solitude and the likelihood of his death, while Greta embraces her Norwegian ancestry, eventually finding her way into the arms of a sturdy pianist. Surrounding each are harsh landscapes of wintry desolation, a dashed ship, a frozen coastline, a rundown fishing shack on Lake Superior. But the falling snow becomes a potent symbol of renewal, even reverence when religion itself has withered away in the cold. Odd Einar's tale is loosely based upon a celebrated true story. Greta's narrative follows from The Lighthouse Road (2012) and Wintering (2016) to conclude the Eide family trilogy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

    • Library Journal

      August 28, 2020

      Toggling between the 1890s and the present day, this latest from Geye (Wintering) unfolds the story of Greta Eide while relating her family history, starting with Odd Einer Eide and wife Inger in the northernmost reaches of Norway. In northernmost contemporary Minnesota, Greta, who is struggling with a failing marriage, looks back at her family and its enduring traits and proclivities. She discovers that Odd is something of a folk hero in Norway, having survived two weeks stranded on a frozen island while on a seal hunt. A book about his ordeal comes to light, along with other family documents that clarify much of what Greta has been missing in her life. Meanwhile, a handsome, piano-playing Norwegian sailor steps in and sweeps Greta off her feet and into a new chapter of her life. VERDICT Geye does a fair job of narrating the tale in a woman's voice, and his larger-than-life characters have skills--both mechanical and coping--beyond what most people can claim. Heroic rugged individualism plays out from start to finish in a story recommended for fans of fiction focusing on family history, personal growth, and stories based in "northernmost" America. --Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence

      Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Kirkus

      Starred review from February 1, 2020
      A writer explores her family's humble Norwegian roots. In 1897, Norwegian fisherman Odd Einar Eide sets sail hundreds of miles above the Arctic Circle on a seal hunt. When his companion is slaughtered by a polar bear, Odd Einar must survive alone in the "fine desolation" of ice and snow for two weeks, until he's rescued by a passing ship. Given up for dead by his wife, Inger, Odd Einar returns home in the midst of his own funeral, forcing the impoverished couple to face the challenge of restoring their already fragile relationship. That task is complicated by the lingering ache from the absence of their daughter, Thea, departed two years earlier for America and silent since that time. Odd Einar's tale is framed by the story of his descendant Greta Nansen, a freelance journalist living in present-day Minneapolis, who embarks on the project of reclaiming her family's history as her own marriage of 20 years implodes. Alternating between the "rocky shore of hardened, desperate people living in poverty and gloom" in 19th-century rural Norway and Greta's life, where, despite her material comfort, loneliness is "the only feeling she had anymore," Geye (Wintering, 2016, etc.) artfully spans 120 years of the Eide family's story. With equal skill, he portrays Odd Einar's dramatic confrontation with implacable nature while exploring the tension between terror and resignation that haunts the involuntary adventurer's every step in that crisis. The choice to pair this pulsating adventure story with the subdued domestic drama of Greta's failed marriage and her discovery of the possibility of new love with musician Stig Hjalmarson when she impulsively travels to her ancestral home in the remote village of Hammerfest is not without risk. But Geye maintains an elegant counterpoint between the two narratives so that the novel is equally satisfying whether it's situated in the past or present. One man's terrifying story of survival in an Arctic wasteland reverberates profoundly in the life of his distant descendant.

      COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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