I Cheerfully Refuse (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)

by Leif Enger

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A big-hearted, hopeful novel that's part adventure story, part love story, and a delight to read. The dialogue, characters and sense of place are unforgettable. Not to be missed by fans of Emily St. John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility or Station Eleven.

This Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition features an essay from the author, as well as a reading group guide.

A career defining tour-de-force from New York Times bestselling, award-winning and “formidably gifted” (Chicago Tribune) author of Peace Like a River Leif Enger.

A storyteller “of great humanity and huge heart” (Minneapolis Star Tribune), Leif Enger debuted in the literary world with Peace Like a River which sold over a million copies and captured readers’ hearts around the globe. Now comes a new milestone in this boldly imaginative author’s accomplished, resonant body of work. Set in a not-too-distant America, I Cheerfully Refuse is the tale of a bereaved and pursued musician embarking under sail on a sentient Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved, bookselling wife. Rainy, an endearing bear of an Orphean narrator, seeks refuge in the harbors, fogs and remote islands of the inland sea. Encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, Rainy finds on land an increasingly desperate and illiterate people, a malignant billionaire ruling class, crumbled infrastructure and a lawless society. Amidst the Gulliver-like challenges of life at sea and no safe landings, Rainy is lifted by physical beauty, surprising humor, generous strangers, and an unexpected companion in a young girl who comes aboard. And as his innate guileless nature begins to make an inadvertent rebel of him, Rainy’s private quest for the love of his life grows into something wider and wilder, sweeping up friends and foes alike in his strengthening wake.

I Cheerfully Refuse epitomizes the “musical, sometimes magical and deeply satisfying kind of storytelling” (Los Angeles Times) for which Leif Enger is cherished.  A rollicking narrative in the most evocative of settings, this latest novel is a symphony against despair and a rallying cry for the future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802163943
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	04/02/2024
Edition description:	Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	12,061
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Leif Enger grew up in Osakis, Minnesota, and worked as a reporter for Minnesota Public Radio before writing his bestselling debut novel Peace Like a River, which won the Booksense Award for Fiction and was named one of the Year's Best Books by Time Magazine and the Los Angeles Times. His second novel, So Brave, Young, and Handsome, was also a national bestseller. It was a Midwest Booksellers Honor Book, and won the High Plains Book Award for Fiction. His third novel Virgil Wander was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was named a best book of the year by Amazon, Library Journal, Bookpage, and Chicago Public Library. He lives with his wife in Duluth, MN.

Editorial Reviews

With a tranquil steadiness and an ear for sharp poetic detail, David Aaron Baker captures a very American, or perhaps a very post-American, voice in this postapocalyptic tale of a man who witnesses a world unraveling. Books are banned. Food is scarce. And murders go unpunished. Our hero sails across the Great Lakes in search of old memories and a shelter in the storm. When he rescues a clever, world-weary 9-year-girl from the clutches of indentured servitude, he finds he can no longer escape an unhinged world. Baker captures climate change, petty dictators, and mindless torture with a sense of eerie gloom, but he is at his best reflecting the heart, humor, and humanity of a soul who won't give up hope. B.P. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

MAY 2024 - AudioFile

Praise for I Cheerfully Refuse 

"A book that reads like music, both battle hymn and love song for our world. A true epic—heartbreaking, terrifyingly prophetic, but above all, radically hopeful.” — Violet Kupersmith, author of Build Your House Around My Body

"A heart-racing ballad of escape, shot-through with villainy and dignity, humor and music. Like Mark Twain, Enger gives us a full accounting of the human soul, scene by scene, wave by wave.” — Josh Ritter, singer and author of The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All

Praise for Virgil Wander

“Enger deserves to be mentioned alongside the likes of Richard Russo and Thomas McGuane. Virgil Wander is a lush crowd-pleaser about meaning and second chances and magic.”—New York Times Book Review

“[Virgil Wander] brings out the charm and downright strangeness of the defiantly normal.” ―Wall Street Journal

“Enger is a writer to be appreciated by anyone who cares about words.”—Seattle Times

 

Praise for Peace Like a River

“Here is an author we can trust and who we are willing to follow anywhere. Enger strikes just the right balance of instinctive storytelling, narrative play and pretty prose.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Book lovers inclined to complain that novelists don’t write gripping yarns anymore would do well to pick up a copy of Peace Like a River, a compelling blend of traditional and artfully offbeat storytelling . . . a miracle well worth witnessing.”— Boston Globe

“The narrative picks up power and majesty, then thunders to a tragic, yet joyous, climax.” – People

“Gripping… Filled with sharp prose and vividly realized scenes, [Peace Like a River] has the makings of that rarest commodity: the literate bestseller.” – The Minneapolis Star Tribune

From the Publisher