To the Bright Edge of the World

by Eowyn Ivey

Overview

An atmospheric, transporting tale of adventure, love, and survival from the bestselling author of The Snow Child, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

One of the Best Books of 2016—Amazon
A Washington Post Notable Book of 2016
A Goodreads Choice Award Nominee
A Library Journal Top 10 Book of 2016
A BookPage Best Book of 2016

In the winter of 1885, decorated war hero Colonel Allen Forrester leads a small band of men on an expedition that has been deemed impossible: to venture up the Wolverine River and pierce the vast, untamed Alaska Territory. Leaving behind Sophie, his newly pregnant wife, Colonel Forrester records his extraordinary experiences in hopes that his journal will reach her if he doesn't return—once he passes beyond the edge of the known world, there's no telling what awaits him.

The Wolverine River Valley is not only breathtaking and forbidding but also terrifying in ways that the colonel and his men never could have imagined. As they map the territory and gather information on the native tribes, whose understanding of the natural world is unlike anything they have ever encountered, Forrester and his men discover the blurred lines between human and wild animal, the living and the dead. And while the men knew they would face starvation and danger, they cannot escape the sense that some greater, mysterious force threatens their lives.

Meanwhile, on her own at Vancouver Barracks, Sophie chafes under the social restrictions and yearns to travel alongside her husband. She does not know that the winter will require as much of her as it does her husband, that both her courage and faith will be tested to the breaking point. Can her exploration of nature through the new art of photography help her to rediscover her sense of beauty and wonder?

The truths that Allen and Sophie discover over the course of that fateful year change both of their lives—and the lives of those who hear their stories long after they're gone—forever.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316242851
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	08/02/2016
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Eowyn LeMay Ivey was raised in Alaska and continues to live there with her husband and two daughters. She received her BA in journalism and minor in creative writing through the honors program at Western Washington University, studied creative nonfiction at the University of Alaska Anchorage graduate program, and worked for nearly 10 years as an award-winning reporter at the Frontiersman newspaper. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Snow Child.

Editorial Reviews

…powerful…Ivey is a gifted storyteller and a lyrical prose stylist…but this historical novel's foremost strength may be its contemporary relevance. Josh Sloan, the museum curator who is putting together an exhibit of artifacts from Forrester's expedition, reflects upon reading the colonel's mythic tales of restless spirits and untameable wilderness: "I'm not saying that other world is gone, because I'm not convinced it is. Maybe we just don't have the eyes for it anymore." We often count on our artists to see the wild beauty our civilized eyes no longer can, to remind us, as Ivey does in her remarkable new book, what the land has allowed. We might take away from her poetic prose what those first explorers discovered. Nature is something greater than ourselves, something sacred that can't be claimed as our own.

The New York Times Book Review - Amy Greene

★ 06/13/2016
An 1885 wilderness expedition, a female pioneer of photography, and Native American myths come to life make Ivey’s second novel (after The Snow Child) an entrancing, occasionally chilling, depiction of turn-of-the-century Alaska. Through diaries, letters, reports, newspaper clippings, drawings, and photographs, Ivey evokes an Indian Wars veteran’s expedition up the Wolverine River into Alaska’s northern interior. Colonel Allen Forrester’s mission is to map the territory, make contact with inhabitants, and collect information for future (military or commercial) enterprises. While his wife, Sophie, remains in Vancouver, Forrester sets off with the intellectually gifted Pruitt and Sergeant Tillman, a rough-and-tumble miner’s son. Others joining the party include a trapper, his partner, a Native American woman who claims to have slit her husband’s throat, and a dog. But the strangest traveling companion, more nemesis than guide, is an old Native American known as the Man Who Flies on Black Wings, who is reputed to be a raven who can take the form of man. Bogged down by the terrain and his own ignorance, loosening ties to civilization if not reality, Pruitt succumbs to memories, and Forrester refuses to shoot wild geese fearing they may be humans in animal form. Sophie, meanwhile, learns to use a camera, building her own darkroom and a hunter’s blind to photograph bird nests in the wild. Years later, a descendant of the Forresters donates their journals and artifacts to a museum in the small town now on the expedition route, site of rafting tours and a million-dollar fishing lodge. In this splendid adventure novel, Ivey captures Alaska’s beauty and brutality, not just preserving history, but keeping it alive. Agent: Jeff Kleinman, Folio Literary. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"The real journey in Eowyn Ivey's new novel transcends the physical landscape to a netherworld of magical, mysterious and sometimes diabolical proportions."—Betty J. Cotter, Providence Journal

From the Publisher

03/01/2016
As evidenced by her New York Times best seller, The Snow Child, also a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Ivey writes with an arresting blend of near-mythic sensibility and gorgeous, soaring exactitude that she should put to good use in this second novel. In the chill of an 1885 Alaska winter, Lt. Col. Allen Forrester launches an expedition up the unforgiving Wolverine River, intent on assessing the country's newly acquired territory and indigenous peoples. He's desperate to get the job done and return to his pregnant wife, but the Alaskan wilds aren't called wild for nothing. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal

★ 2016-05-17
A husband and wife explore separate but parallel frontiers in the wild Northwest of the late 1800s.Ivey's superb second novel (The Snow Child, 2012) is mainly composed of two braided journals. One is by Allen, an Army colonel who fought Apaches in Arizona in the 1860s but by 1885 has a gentler temperament and wants to explore the Wolverine River in southern Alaska. The other is by his wife, Sophie, who'd be eager to join him if it weren't for know-your-place lectures from fellow Army wives. Allen and his small band endure a host of familiar travails—scarce food and ammunition, bad weather, skeptical natives. But his secret, unofficial diary also includes more surrealistic experiences, like a discovered newborn baby whose umbilical cord is connected to a tree root. Back at the Army barracks, Sophie discovers she's pregnant but soon miscarries—most likely due to the opium tinctures prescribed by her condescending doctor—and discovers photography as a way to navigate through her grief. Ivey means to say that Allen and Sophie are equally pioneering to the extent that society of the time allowed them to be, but first and foremost this is an exceptionally well-turned adventure tale, rich with Allen's confrontations with brutal snowstorms and murky underwater beasts and Sophie's more interior efforts to learn her craft and elbow local busybodies out of her way. Brief, poetic entries and sketches by a member of Allen's cohort give the story a series of lyrical grace notes, and Ivey anchors the tale in present-day correspondence between Allen's great-nephew and the curator of a museum to whom he's sent Allen's journals. Those letters make an elegant and affecting argument that though the territory is tamer now, not everything that makes it spiritually inspiring has been thawed out and paved over. Heartfelt, rip-snorting storytelling.

Kirkus Reviews

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