Deep River: A Novel

Deep River: A Novel

by Karl Marlantes
Deep River: A Novel

Deep River: A Novel

by Karl Marlantes

eBook

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Overview

Three Finnish siblings head for the logging fields of nineteenth-century America in the New York Times–bestselling author’s “commanding historical epic” (Washington Post).

Born into a farm family, the three Koski siblings—Ilmari, Matti, and Aino—are raised to maintain their grit and resiliency in the face of hardship. This lesson in sisu takes on special meaning when their father is arrested by imperial Russian authorities, never to be seen again. Lured by the prospects of the Homestead Act, Ilmari and Matti set sail for America, while young Aino, feeling betrayed and adrift after her Marxist cell is exposed, follows soon after.

The brothers establish themselves among a logging community in southern Washington, not far from the Columbia River. In this New World, they each find themselves—Ilmari as the family’s spiritual rock; Matti as a fearless logger and entrepreneur; and Aino as a fiercely independent woman and union activist who is willing to make any sacrifice for the cause that sustains her.

Layered with fascinating historical detail, this novel bears witness to the stump-ridden fields that the loggers—and the first waves of modernity—leave behind. At its heart, Deep River explores the place of the individual, and of the immigrant, in an America still in the process of defining its own identity.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780802146199
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date: 04/12/2022
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 858
Sales rank: 239,586
File size: 4 MB

About the Author

About The Author
Karl Marlantes graduated from Yale University and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, before serving as a Marine in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation Medals for valor, two Purple Hearts, and ten air medals. He is the bestselling author of Matterhorn and What It Is Like to Go to War. He lives in rural Washington.

Read an Excerpt

Aino focused on one steam donkey. The cable came up off the ground as the tension increased. She couldn’t follow the entire line of it, because the terrain was so rugged, but could see its end where it wound around an anchoring block that must have weighed a thousand pounds. The block was cinched with a smaller cable to a stump that was at least fourteen feet in diameter. She marveled at the sight. How could men, weighing 150 pounds, have hauled all this dead weight of steel and cable across that terrain?

Those men were now scrambling for safety, ducking behind stumps, finding shelter in the torn ground, as more steam poured into the donkey’s pistons. The massive cable drums whirred, jerking a log weighing several tons from where it laid, bringing it bucking and slamming through the slash like a runaway railroad car to the landing as fast as the massive cable drums could turn.

Ilmari told her that just one of these Douglas firs could produce enough lumber to build three or four houses. She hadn’t believed him. With each splintering, anguished crackle, when fibers that had held for centuries first started to part, with each moaning, creaking groan as the tree leaned and tore loose from its stump, with each shouted whisper of air rushing through the limbs of a rapidly accelerating top, with each ground-shaking crash signaling a tree’s death, she believed. Everything about the place spoke danger and filled her with respect for these men.

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