Explore our new BookBrowse Community Forum!

Book Summary and Reviews of Wintering by Peter Geye

Wintering by Peter Geye

Wintering

by Peter Geye

  • Critics' Consensus:
  • Published:
  • Jun 2016, 320 pages
  • Rate this book

About this book

Book Summary

A highly acclaimed novelist now gives us a true epic: a love story that spans sixty years, generations' worth of feuds, and secrets withheld and revealed.

The two principal stories at play in Wintering 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.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"Capturing the strength and mystery of characters who seem inextricable from the landscape, Geye's novel is an unsentimental testament to the healing that's possible when we confront our bleakest places." - Publishers Weekly

"The relatively small and enclosed community is Geye's perfect laboratory for exploring human nature." - Booklist

"Reminiscent of Jack London's 'To Build a Fire' and Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, Geye's narrative takes us deep into both human and natural wilderness." - Kirkus

"In one beautifully etched sentence after another, Peter Geye's Wintering explores the remote wilderness of Minnesota, and the even more remote and mysterious wilderness of family history. I found myself lost inside it, in all the best ways a reader can be lost." - Alix Ohlin

"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

"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

"An elegant, quietly profound, and harrowing novel. I loved this book." - Emily St. John Mandel

"Geye is a masterful writer whose elegiac prose captures both the holiness and brutality of nature. Wintering is a stunning book, one that takes hold of the reader from the first haunting line and never lets go." - Amy Greene

"Peter Geye writes with a nigh-mythic force. An extraordinary novel." - Jeffrey Lent

This information about Wintering was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Peter Geye

Peter Geye was born and raised in Minneapolis, where he continues to live. His previous novels are Safe from the Sea and The Lighthouse Road.

More Author Information

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more literary fiction...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Margo's Got Money Troubles
    Margo's Got Money Troubles
    by Rufi Thorpe
    Forgive me if I begin this review with an awkward confession. My first impression of author Rufi ...
  • Book Jacket: Our Evenings
    Our Evenings
    by Alan Hollinghurst
    Alan Hollinghurst's novel Our Evenings is the fictional autobiography of Dave Win, a British ...
  • Book Jacket: Graveyard Shift
    Graveyard Shift
    by M. L. Rio
    Following the success of her debut novel, If We Were Villains, M. L. Rio's latest book is the quasi-...
  • Book Jacket: The Sisters K
    The Sisters K
    by Maureen Sun
    The Kim sisters—Minah, Sarah, and Esther—have just learned their father is dying of ...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Pony Confidential
    by Christina Lynch

    In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.

Who Said...

Use what talents you possess: The woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

F the M

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.