Peter Geye reads from his new novel "Wintering"

“There’s no greater literary pleasure than watching a master emerge. I’ve witnessed Peter Geye grow into that distinction for coming on two decades now. All I can say is Wintering proves his finest, most powerful work yet.”--Joseph Boyden, author of The Orenda

“The last time I read a literary thriller so profound Cormac McCarthy s name was on its spine. But Peter Geye is his own man, and Wintering is as unique and menacingly beautiful as its Minnesota borderlands setting.”--Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls

Wintering is a true epic: a love story that spans sixty years, generations worth of feuds, and secrets withheld and revealed. The two principal stories 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 thirty years earlier in 1963, fleeing a crumbling marriage and bringing along Gustav, his eighteen-year-old son, pitching this audacious, potentially fatal scheme winter already coming on, in these woods, on these waters as a reenactment of the ancient voyageurs journeys of discovery.

It’s certainly something Gus has never forgotten, nor the Devil’s Maw of a river, a variety of beloved (possibly fantastical) maps, the ice floes and waterfalls (neither especially appealing from a canoe), a magnificent bear, the endless portages, a magical abandoned shack, Thanksgiving and Christmas improvised at the far end of the earth, the brutal cold and sheer beauty of it all. And men hunting other men.

Now with his father pronounced dead Gus relates their adventure in vivid detail to Berit Lovig, who d spent much of her life waiting for Harry, her passionate conviction finally fulfilled over the last two decades. So, a middle-aged man rectifying his personal history, an aging lady wrestling with her own, and with the entire saga of a town and region they’d helped to form and were in turn formed by, relentlessly and unforgettably.

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Peter Geye received his MFA from the University of New Orleans and his PhD from Western Michigan University, where he was editor of Third Coast. He was born and raised in Minneapolis and lives still. He is the author of the multiple award-winning novels Safe from the Sea and The Lighthouse Road.