Lin Enger – Undiscovered Country

Author Lin Enger 

Undiscovered Country

The Story Line

While hunting in the cold northern Minnesota woods, seventeen-year-old Jesse Matson’s life is forever changed when he discovers his father, dead by a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head.

But would easygoing Harold Matson really kill himself? If so, why? And just where was Jesse’s uncle Clay–always jealous of Harold, and a bit too friendly with Jesse’s mother–that cold afternoon?

Haunted by the ghost of his father, Jesse searches deeper into the secrets his family holds, and must decide what he will and will not take into his own hands. Written with a simple elegance, UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY is a hair-bristling story of betrayal, revenge, and the possibilities of forgiveness-and the riveting portrait of a young man trying to hold his family together in a world tipped suddenly upside down.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With flashes of prose as crisp and haunting as the frozen Minnesota setting, Enger’s debut opens 10 years after Jesse Matson’s father’s alleged suicide, as 17-year-old Jesse sits down to write his own version of events. While hunting with his father in the woods surrounding their hometown of Battlepoint, Minn., the young Jesse hears a shot and finds his father dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. Adamant that his father could never take his own life, Jesse determines to uncover the truth. While his mother, Genevieve, retreats to her and his younger brother, Magnus, looks to

him for reassurance, Jesse becomes convinced that his uncle Clay actually killed his father. Despite a lack of evidence or support from law enforcement, Jesse hatches a plan to avenge his father’s death, bolstered by his deepening relationship with a girl who has plenty of problems of her own. Allusions to Hamlet and Hemingway’s In Our Time (Jesse reads both in school) do a little too much foreshadowing, but the landscape is beautifully rendered, and Jesse’s confusion is palpable. (July)
Copyright

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Reviews

“With flashes of prose as crisp and haunting as the frozen Minnesota setting.”

~Publishers Weekly

“At once both otherworldly and shockingly real, Undiscovered Country reinvents the conundrum of love and loss facing a modern-day Hamlet. This first novel by Lin Enger is sincerely rendered and honestly invoked. Such results promise more to come.”

~Tom Bailey, author of The Grace That Keeps This World

“Lin Enger starts Undiscovered Country with a literal bang and continues to ratchet up the tension. His characters are vivid and complex, and his descriptions of northern Minnesota in winter are astonishing. This retelling of a Shakespearean tragedy is powerful and engrossing.”

~Larry Watson, author of Montana 1948

“This is a novel of luminous sentences that carry us across a landscape of love and loss to a deeper understanding of our own lives, and of our desire to be forgiven and redeemed. It is a joy to read.”

~Don J. Snyder author of The Cliff Walk and Of Time & Memory

“Lin Enger’s first novel brings the heft of Shakespearean drama to the north woods of Minnesota. In a cleanly-elegant narrative, Enger weaves a winter’s tale of betrayal and ghosts, of one son’s debt to his father and the wages of vengeance. For the reader, Undiscovered Country is the best kind of discovery-a riveting first novel that’s a genuine page turner, and an author whose work bears watching.”

 ~Claire Davis, author of Winter Range 

About the Author

Lin Enger is the MFA director at Minnesota State University, Moorhead. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he lives in Minnesota with his wife and two children.

A recipient of the James Michener Award, the Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship, and a Jerome travel grant, his short fiction has been published extensively. This is his first novel.