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by Jim Harrison (Author)
One of American literature's most significant authors delivers "a coming-of-age story, a familial saga of estrangement . . . A slow-burning revenge tragedy" (The New York Times Book Review).
An epic tale that pits a son against the legacy of his family's desecration of the earth, and his own father's more personal violations, Jim Harrison's True North is a beautiful and moving novel that speaks to the territory in our hearts that calls us back to our roots.
The scion of a family of wealthy timber barons, David Burkett has grown up with a father who is a malevolent force and a mother made vague and numb by alcohol and pills. He and his sister Cynthia, a firecracker who scandalizes the family at fourteen by taking up with the son of their Finnish-Native American gardener, are mostly left to make their own way. As David comes to adulthood--often guided and enlightened by the unforgettable, intractable, courageous women he loves--he realizes he must come to terms with his forefathers' rapacious destruction of the woods of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, as well as the working people who made their wealth possible.
Jim Harrison has given us a family tragedy of betrayal, amends, and justice for the worst sins. True North is a bravura performance from one of our finest writers, accomplished with deep humanity, humor, and redemptive soul.
"A provocative tale that explores the roots of wealth and privilege in America . . . Harrison's writing is superb, as always, rippling with thematic leaps and poetic insights." --The Oregonian
Author Biography
Jim Harrison was born in 1937, in Grayling, Michigan. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Playboy, and The New York Times.
Harrison was also the author of over thirty books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including seven volumes of novellas, Legends of the Fall (1979), The Woman Lit by Fireflies (1990), Julip (1994), The Beast God Forgot to Invent (2000), The Summer He Didn't Die (2005), The Farmer's Daughter (2010), and The River Swimmer (2013); eleven novels, Wolf (1971), A Good Day to Die (1973), Farmer (1976), Warlock (1981), Sundog (1984), Dalva (1988), The Road Home (1998), True North (2004), Returning to Earth (2007), The English Major (2008), and The Great Leader (2011); thirteen collections of poetry, including most recently Songs of Unreason (2011), In Search of Small Gods (2009), and Saving Daylight (2006); and three works of nonfiction, the memoir Off to the Side (2001) and the collections Just Before Dark (1991) and The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand (2001).
The winner of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Spirit of the West Award from the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Letters (2007) and was named Officier des Arts et Lettres (2012) by the French Ministry of Culture for his "significant contribution to the enrichment of the French cultural inheritance." His work has been published in twenty-seven languages.
Harrison lived in Montana and Arizona before his death in 2016 at the age of seventy-eight.
