by Tom Kizzia
First published 2022
Jim Edwards arrives in McCarthy, Alaska after the last copper train departs the valley. The old mining town sits in the Wrangell Mountains, where old-timers and young back-to-the-landers create their own wilderness community. Edwards becomes the longest-residing homesteader in this place that operates by its own rules. The town attracts an outlaw who transforms into Alaska's iconic art-museum sourdough, a Harvard graduate who marries a mountain man after following ascetic Chinese poetry, and bush pilots who navigate the remote terrain. A secret government plan threatens to detonate an atomic bomb in the area. Tourism and speculation pressures mount while conservationists push to establish a national park around the wild surroundings. The community includes feuding prospectors, lovers, crackpots, and con artists who salvage relics from the mining past. One loner decides that Nature would benefit from eliminating all human presence. The story spans fifty years until an armed man arrives one icy morning, ending the lost decades and forcing McCarthy to confront the outside world.
Genres: american-fiction, historical-fiction, adventure, mystery
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, suspenseful
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, found-family
Setting: Alaska, McCarthy, Wrangell Mountains
Period: 20th Century
387 pages · Kindle Edition · Porphyry Press