Due North: A Novel - Hardcover

Smith, Mitchell

3.73

41 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671738771 ISBN 13: 9780671738778

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1992

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Traumatized by the death of her husband, who was mauled by a bear while she watched, Sarah Maher leaves her life as a fur trapper in Alaska and returns to civilization for the first time in years. 17,500 first printing. National ad/promo.

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From Publishers Weekly:

Smith's obvious firsthand knowledge of an unusual subject, combined with a dramatic restatement of a potent contemporary issue, makes this novel a standout. Widowed trapper Sara Maher survives alone in the wilderness of Alaska's Brooks Range. Her fierce alertness in her solitude and her willful mastery of the physical demands of trapping give an austere sensuality to her subsistence. And when she leaves her homestead to gradually return to civilization-dropping her dogs at an Inuit settlement, trading her furs in Chancy, flying out of Fairbanks to join her divorced sister and dying mother in Seattle-her strength only grows more hypnotic. After what she has endured in extremis, Sara's return is hardly that of an innocent. And Smith trains the same sharp eye for detail on the lower 48's nursing homes and emotionally barren suburbs that he does on the death of a lynx in Alaska. In putting this complex woman in the wilderness and the postindustrial Northwest alike, and showing the human cost of her difficult choices, Smith (Stone City) creates a starkly dramatic odyssey that far outdistances the hands-off pieties of even the best nature writing. The novel, like its uncompromising heroine, stands alone-animal, spiritual, humorous, sharp-tongued. Smith's story inspires unsuspected sympathies for places few have ever been.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Smith's novel depicts a great journey for one woman through the wilds of Alaska, the urbanized jungle in Seattle, and, most importantly, into the self. The author skillfully collects all the sights, sounds, smells, and instincts of a remote life on the Alaskan frontier and serves it to the reader on a silver platter. Sara Whaley Maher, a 37-year-old former teacher and trapper, and now an aspiring writer, is considered bad luck by the Alaskan natives. She has witnessed what no one would ever want to experience: the gruesome, traumatic killing of her husband by a menacing grizzly bear. Was she a coward? Sara cannot share her painful experience and cannot hide from it even in faraway Seattle. What she finally learns is that life will always concern survival. It's simply a matter of the level of survival one is willing to accept: "How would you like to live in a monkey cage for the rest of your life?" For Sara, the choice becomes crystal clear, though for others the choice is never made. Recommended for all fiction collections.
- Marlene Lee, Drain Branch Lib., Ore.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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