POSTPONED // NEW DATE TBD
Presented by Magers & Quinn
Featuring special guest Curtis Sittenfeld
Tuesday, April 14, 2020
6:00 pm Doors // 7:00 pm Show (includes author book signing and Q&A)
Tickets on Sale 8:00 am, Friday February 21
$38: general admission for one plus one copy of Northernmost
$58: general admission for two plus one copy of Northernmost
All Ages
Ticket Purchases are Final and Non-Refundable
Acclaimed novelist Peter Geye celebrates the release of his newest book, Northernmost, a thrilling ode to the spirit of adventure and the vagaries of loss and love. Joining Geye will be special guest, author Curtis Sittenfeld. The event will include a special raffle with proceeds supporting The Loft Literary Center.
Northernmost
In 1897, Odd Einar Eide returns home from a near-death experience in the Arctic only to discover his own funeral underway. 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 earlier but has yet to send even a single letter back to them in Hammerfest, their small Norwegian town at the top of the earth.
More than a century later, Greta Nansen has finally begun to admit to herself that her marriage is over. Desperately unhappy and unfulfilled, she makes the decision to follow her husband from their home in Minnesota to Oslo, where he has traveled for work, to end it once and for all. But on impulse, for reasons unknown even to her, she diverts her travels to Hammerfest: the town of her ancestors, the town where her great-great-grandmother Thea was born–and for some reason never returned to.
Braiding together two remarkable stories of love and survival, Northernmost wades into the darkest recesses of the human heart and celebrates the remarkable ability of humans to endure nearly unimaginable trials.
“We might as well give Peter Geye the Nobel Prize for winter, or declare him the poet laureate of snow. For no other writer so skillfully captures landscapes of glacier and tundra—both their bleakness and their particular beauty. To read him is to feel the ache of a blizzard on your skin. But in Northernmost, he has also given us an exhilarating tale of adventure and love and heartache and faith, a story of overcoming the most trying ordeals imaginable. Partly a tale of heroic survival, partly a meticulously researched history, and partly an epic romance, Northernmost is, most of all, a beautiful, big-hearted, triumphant novel.”
—Nathan Hill, author of THE NIX
“Northernmost fascinated me with its frozen landscapes and Arctic winters, and it warmed me with the tenderness of its storytelling and humanity of its characters. Peter Geye has written a tremendously satisfying family saga about the tenacity of love amid the unpredictable, ungovernable forces that act on our lives.”
—Maggie Shipstead, author of Astonish Me
“Northernmost is rich in history, adventure, and love. A study of marriage and family across time and geographies, Peter Geye offers a restrained, emotionally complicated tale of men and women whose lives are lived in the cold expanse of their yearnings and desires. The descriptive language is exquisite. Geye understands the fine balance between who are born to be and how we birth ourselves across the seasons of our lives.”
—Kao Kalia Yang, author of The Song Poet
Peter Geye is the award-winning author of Safe from the Sea (2009), The Lighthouse Road (2012), and Wintering (2016) which received the 2017 Minnesota Book Award. He holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and a PhD from Western Michigan University, where he was editor of Third Coast. A regular teaching artist at The Loft, Geye was born and raised in Minneapolis where he still lives.
Curtis Sittenfeld is the bestselling author of five novels: Prep, The Man of My Dreams, American Wife, Sisterland, and Eligible. Her first story collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It, was published in 2018 and picked for Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club. Her books have been selected by The New York Times, Time, Entertainment Weekly, and People for their “Ten Best Books of the Year” lists, optioned for television and film, and translated into thirty languages. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and Esquire, and her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, Time, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Slate, and on “This American Life.” A graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Curtis has interviewed Michelle Obama for Time; appeared as a guest on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” CBS’s “Early Show,” and PBS’s Newshour; and twice been a strangely easy “Jeopardy!” answer.