Northernmost

A Novel

By: Peter Geye

Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Lisa Flanagan

Length: 11 hrs and 34 mins

Publisher's Summary

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.

©2020 Peter Geye (P)2020 Random House Audio

Critic Reviews

"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)

"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 Astonish Me) 

"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 heartrending struggles." (William Kent Krueger, author of This Tender Land)

Great Norwegian story - less American one

Loved Ode Inar and the Norwegian story and characters. American woman less so though intrigued by Steig (the musician). Both stories fit together nicely but love story lacked something.