Against the wilds of sea and wood, a young immigrant woman settles into life outside Duluth in the 1890s, still shocked at finding herself alone in a new country, abandoned and adrift. In the early 1920s, her orphan son, now grown, falls in love with the one woman he shouldn't and uses his best skills to build them their own small ark to escape. But their pasts travel with them, threatening to capsize even their fragile hope. In this triumphant novel, Peter Geye has crafted another deeply moving tale of a misbegotten family shaped by the rough landscape in which they live -- often at the mercy of wildlife and weather and by the rough edges of their own breaking hearts.