Jim Harrison - True North

Praise for True North:

David Burkett is part Holden Caulfield, part Stephen Dedalus a young man who has exchanged privilege for guilt. He knows that his work is to find a place in the world, but the finding isnt easy. A story about love and forgiveness and the trials they entail Our lives are gripped by forces we only dimly understand. The real effort, Harrison implies, is to act in spite of those forces, correct for deviance, and find our own true north.

Los Angeles Times Book Review

[True North] is a provocative tale that explores the roots of wealth and privilege in America and examines the troubled legacy of our nineteenth-century attitudes toward the land. Harrisons writing is superb, as always, rippling with thematic leaps and poetic insights.

The Oregonian

A coming-of-age story, a familial saga of estrangement a slow-burning revenge tragedy There is no denying the urgency of Harrisons storytelling, or his passionate involvement in the fate of his embattled hero. In [Harrisons] portrait of a father and a son he has made an indelible addition to the gallery of literatures bad dads.

The New York Times Book Review

When Harrison writes about a blizzard, you shiver. When he describes a thunderstorm, you see lightning. And when writing about fishing, the author is at his most poetic.

San Francisco Chronicle

Harrison combines a love of nature and life in the wild, which he describes in splendid, soaring prose, with a rich and troubled conscience tortured by the ambiguities of modern life.

The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

Makes the crimes against the land painfully vivid His fathers misdeeds propel Burkett into the woods or across international boundaries to unearth secrets. This human story of a sons attempt to understand a parents cruelty is [a] deftly told tale.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

True North may be Harrisons best work. His work is deep and soulful; superficiality has no place in his world.

Idaho Mountain Express

The genius of Mr. Harrison, it seems to me, is that his characters possess a uniquely human and endearing clumsiness as well as a gracefulness in the way they inhabit the sharp and sometimes exuberantly felt physical world and the restless (though also at times exuberant) realm of spirit.

Rick Bass, The Dallas Morning News

A worthy addition to the great work [of Harrison], and shows a writer, who, while comfortable with his themes, places and people, is not complacent in them The scheme here isnt man against nature; it is man into nature, and it is this scheme that brings the book its keenest pleasures. The land is beautifully, lovingly described, the writing rich with impeccable detail and the lore of the woods.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

[Harrison is] an accomplished and worthy writer who has written multi-layered, earthy, and spiritual explorations of human appetites and needs, of action, art, sex, violence, love and death. [True North] is a rich and satisfying read [that makes] a rustic backwoods cabin in the forbidding frozen wilderness seem the quintessence of hearth and home. It certainly helps elucidate why a character would go to the ends of the world to safeguard his little corner of it.

The San Diego Union-Tribune

If [Jim Harrisons] style can be as clean and clear as Cathers, he writes with Faulkners voluble, untidy spilling forth. The past twenty-five years has been a timid time in American writing, pinched and cramped by ideology and theory, a time of rules and warnings. Harrison abides by none of these.

The Boston Phoenix

A novel in the grand European tradition Religion and history figure here on a huge scale, as they do in the works of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. An engaging read by a writer to be reckoned with.

St. Petersburg Times

True North is a richly layered work of art. As an artist, Harrison does what art is supposed to do whether on a grand scale or small, one flawed human being at a time. He illuminates. He investigates. He shows us what we know but deny. He enlarges understanding.

Traverse City Record-Eagle (Michigan)

A terrific book.

National Post (Canada)

[A] transcendent new novel.

Jay MacDonald, The News-Press (Florida)

One of our greatest living literary stylists.

Great Falls Tribune (Montana)

[Harrisons] words absorb you and carry you along so that the reading is a delight. In True North, Harrison takes his homeland novel a step further, with the Upper Peninsula emerging as a force, as much a fully developed character as many of the humans.

The Burlington Free Press

Harrison is a writer of prodigal gifts and a keen registrar of impressions. The book overflows with marvelous description and hard-bitten wisdom.

The Buffalo News

It takes a writer of Harrisons maturity and knowingness to elevate [True North] from merely another historical novel to an almost mythological story about mans fate. Its a melancholy and beautiful performance by Harrison, taking the story of one prominent family and extending it as a metaphor for the country.

News-Tribune (Tacoma)

Riveting A master of surprise endings, Harrison pulls off a bravura climax. Harrisons tragic sense of history and his ironic insight into the depravities of human nature are as potent as ever and bring deeper meaning to his redemptive tale.

Publishers Weekly

[Harrison] is at his best describing the simple pleasures. He also has a keen memory for the complex and contradictory feelings young men have for young women. His brawny prose cuts to the heart with clear-eyed insight into the prickly process of creating oneself.

Book Page

Also by Jim Harrison

FICTION
Wolf
A Good Day to Die
Farmer
Legends of the Fall
Warlock
Sundog
Dalva
The Woman Lit by Fireflies
Julip
The Road Home
The Beast God Forgot to Invent
The Summer He Didnt Die

CHILDRENS LITERATURE
The Boy Who Ran to the Woods

POETRY
Plain Song
Locations
Outlyer
Letters to Yesenin
Returning to Earth
Selected & New Poems
The Theory and Practice of Rivers & Other Poems
After Ikky & Other Poems
The Shape of the Journey: Collected Poems

ESSAYS
Just Before Dark
The Raw and the Cooked

MEMOIR
Off to the Side