For two weeks every winter, a rarefied group of ski jumpers travel the Midwest competing in a Five Hills Tournament across some of America’s most notable ski jumps. Thousands of fans pack local ski clubs to witness competitors launch themselves from the large towers that rise menacingly above the flat Midwest landscape. A ski jumper himself, Cooper Dodds’ color photographs highlight a Nordic tradition transplanted in middle America and sustained through extensive volunteer support and young athletes obsessed with the art of flying.

Set against the dramatic landscape of the Minnesota north shore, an estranged father and son reconnect thirty-five years after the father survived the tragic wreck of a Great Lakes ore boat SAFE FROM THE SEA tells the story of Olaf and Noah Torr, a father and son whose long estrangement began after Olaf survived a shipwreck on Lake Superior. More than thirty years after the wreck, Olaf believes he is dying of cancer and asks his son to come home to his isolated cabin on the lake in order to help him die. Over the course of two weeks in November, against the backdrop of the dramatic upper Midwest landscape and weather, the men reconsider each other's lives, finally summoning the courage to confess, understand and forgive. Noah's father finally tells his son for the first time the harrowing account of the wreck of Olaf's ore boat, the SS Ragnar k, a horrible secret from that night, and the survivor's guilt that has dogged Olaf ever since and caused him to abandon his family. Noah's own struggle to make a life with an absent father finds its real reward in his relationship with his sagacious wife, Natalie, whose complications with infertility issues mark her husband's life in ways he only fully understands as the reconciliation with his father takes shape.

Against the wilds of sea and wood, a young immigrant woman settles into life outside Duluth in the 1890s, still shocked at finding herself alone in a new country, abandoned and adrift; in the early 1920s, her orphan son, now grown, falls in love with the one woman he shouldn t and uses his best skills to build them their own small ark to escape. But their pasts travel with them, threatening to capsize even their fragile hope. In this triumphant new novel, Peter Geye has crafted another deeply moving tale of a misbegotten family shaped by the rough landscape in which they live--often at the mercy of wildlife and weather--and by the rough edges of their own breaking hearts."