photo by Devon Marlantes
Karl Marlantes once again brings us an epic that can’t be put down, this time set in the forests and on the rivers of southwest Washington, all soon to be engulfed by logging and fishing. Deep River combines the story of immigrant siblings (from Finland) and a larger Scandinavian community, the desires of families escaping old world despotism for a fresh start, and the politics of Wobblies seeking a just world for workers and immigrant entrepreneurs hoping to get ahead. Family, courage, independence, and love abound in this historical tale.
–Victoria Irwin, Eagle Harbor Books, Bainbridge Island, WA
Eagle Harbor Book Company hosts Marlantes on Thursday, July 18 at 7:00.
We welcome back Washington author Karl Marlantes to celebrate the release of his newest work, Deep River.
Marlantes tells a sweeping family saga inspired by his grandmother’s generation of Finns who immigrated to the logging communities of the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the century. The novel is an incredibly humane tale of courage, sacrifice, and reinvention in the face of political, economic, and natural forces much larger than the individual. Readers will fall in love with protagonist Aino Koski, a strong, independent woman and fiery political activist. Marlantes is the bestselling author of Matterhorn and What It Is Like to Go to War.
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Suzanne’s pick for the summer is Deep River. An epic historical story of the Pacific Northwest in the early 1900’s. In this fictional family saga, Finnish immigrants try their hand at logging the PNW forests. Layered with fascinating historical detail, this is a novel that breathes deeply of the sun-dappled forest and bears witness to the stump-ridden fields the loggers, and the first waves of modernity, leave behind. At its heart, Deep River is an ambitious and timely exploration of the place of the individual, and of the immigrant, in an America still in the process of defining its own identity.
–Suzanne Droppert, Liberty Bay Books, Poulsbo and Bremerton, WA
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It’s been nearly a decade since the release of Marlantes’s acclaimed Vietnam War novel Matterhorn, and . . . readers can at last see what he’s been working on all these years. Like its predecessor, Deep River is a massive piece of fiction, heavy when you pick it up but growing lighter in your hands the more the pages turn. It will carry you away immediately as it tells of Scandinavian immigrants, driven out of their homeland by violence and oppression, who wash up on American shores and carve out new lives in the logging camps and growing towns of the Pacific Northwest. The historical interest is obvious—these are the people who built the state we live in today and this is how they did it—but the story has immense relevance to the present day. Dealing with radical politics, religious freedom, women’s rights, and the idea of America as a refuge, however imperfect, this novel is perhaps more timely than Marlantes expected when he began it.
—James Crossley, Madison Books, Seattle, WA
