Peter Geye
Список книг автора Peter GeyeThe Lighthouse Road
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. Befriended by a local businessman and apothecary with secrets of his own, she obtains work as a cook in the nearby logging camp. While living through one of the coldest and threatening winters in memory, she is raped by an itinerant peddler and petty criminal. She delivers the baby in a blinding snowstorm the next fall, attended by her original benefactor and his “daughter” who is also the town’s surgeon and midwife, but she soon dies of childbirth complications. The apothecary, Grimm, takes the infant into his household and the boy is raised more or less by the entire town, eventually growing up under Grimm’s influence to be a fisherman, smuggler for Grimm’s whiskey trade, and a boat builder. Still, he struggles to find himself and to reconcile the loss of his mother, and he becomes increasingly troubled by Grimm’s criminal enterprises and dirty secrets until an unlikely love affair puts everything on a collision course.
Safe from the Sea
Set against the powerful lakeshore landscape of northern Minnesota, Safe from the Sea is a heartfelt novel in which a son returns home to reconnect with his estranged and dying father thirty-five years after the tragic wreck of a Great Lakes ore boat that the father only partially survived and that has divided them emotionally ever since. When his father for the first time finally tells the story of the horrific disaster he has carried with him so long, it leads the two men to reconsider each other.Meanwhile, Noah’s own struggle to make a life with an absent father has found its real reward in his relationship with his sagacious wife, Natalie, whose complications with infertility issues have marked her husband’s life in ways he only fully realizes as the reconciliation with his father takes shape.Peter Geye has delivered an archetypal story of a father and son, of the tug and pull of family bonds, of Norwegian immigrant culture, of dramatic shipwrecks and the business and adventure of Great Lakes shipping in a setting that simply casts a spell over the characters as well as the reader.
