Pub Day for The High Divide

High Divide Jacket Today is a reading day. Well, every day is a reading day, but today just feels like a daylong, under-a-quilt, cup-of-tea-in-hand sort of reading retreat. Even if you can only carve out five minutes for a reading escape, today is the day for it.

Today is Publication Day for Lin Enger’s The High Divide.

The High Divide is a breathtaking portrait of the vast plains landscape and a journey into the rich expanse of the characters’ emotional terrain. Here’s how Lin described it to Biographile: “The family in my novel is in crisis as the story opens. Husband and father Ulysses Pope has left his Minnesota home without saying where he’s going or when he might return. Soon his two young sons, Eli and Danny, head west in pursuit, and before long his wife, Gretta, has joined the search. These journeys give the novel its shape and movement, and before it ends, the family’s story has merged with the larger narratives of America’s westward expansion.”


These themes took root for Lin long ago with a story told in his own family, as he describes in his essay for “The Algonquin Reader”:
lin-enger-site

“In 1833 my great-grandfather, a Norwegian immigrant, arrived in Dakota Territory to homestead 160 acres of rolling prairie. A year later, according to family legend, the last wild buffalo east of the James River wandered onto the newly broken soil of his farm. He shot the animal behind his sod barn as it drank from the stock tank. Or so the story goes. Like nearly all of our family legends, this one has to be taken on faith (my ancestors were not given to writing things down), but as a boy I was more willing to do so. And ever since, I have been fascinated by the American bison, which at one time roamed through most of the North American  continent, sixty million strong. As I grew older, my romantic attachment to the buffalo – that ragged behemoth of the plains – grew more complicated, especially as I learned how its demise was connected to the destruction of the Indian tribes that wandered those lands and, consequently, to my own family’s American beginnings.

“One story in particular took hold of me.”

Click here to read the rest of his Algonquin Reader essay.

And if you happen to be in this same part of our country this week, please join Lin to celebrate The High Divide and enjoy an evening of Lin’s warmth, intelligence and general delightfulness:
•Today, Sept. 23, 7pm, Zandbroz in Fargo, ND.
Wednesday, Sept. 24, 7pm at  Common Good Books in St. Paul, MN.
Friday, Sept. 26, 7pm at Prairie Lights in Iowa City, IA.

Even if you can’t make it to one of Lin Enger’s events, we still want you to join the celebration: Enter for a chance to win a copy of  The High Divide.
[gravityform id=”143″ name=”Pub Day Giveaway: Enter for a chance to win The High Divide “]
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