Peter Geye and Chris Cander discuss Peter's latest novel "Northernmost"
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In 1897, Odd Einar Eide is lost and struggling to survive in the Arctic. In 2017, Greta Nansen, Odd Eniar’s great, great, great, great granddaughter is searching for meaning in her marriage and life. Peter Geye knits these two narratives together across generations and between Minnesota and Norway to bring us a story of adventure, family and love. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, this is Peter Geye’s best novel yet. I absolutely loved it.
— Nick Ballas (Owner, Next Chapter Booksellers)
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 to survive nearly unimaginable trials.
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. Geye is the author of the award winning novels, Safe from the Sea, The Lighthouse Road, and Wintering, winner of the Minnesota Book Award. He currently teaches the year-long Novel Writing Project at the Loft Literary Center. Born and raised in Minneapolis, he continues to live there with his family.
Peter will be in conversation with author Chris Cander
Chris Cander graduated from the Honors College at the University of Houston, in the city where she was raised and still lives, with her husband, daughter, and son. For seven years she has been a writer-in-residence for Writers in the Schools there. She serves on the Inprint advisory board and stewards several Little Free Libraries in her community. Her first novel, 11 Stories, won the Independent Publisher Gold Medal for Popular Fiction, and her most recent, Whisper Hollow, was long-listed for the Great Santini Fiction Prize by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance. She is also the author of The Word Burglar, which won the 2014 Moonbeam Children's Book Award (silver).
