Black Woods, Blue Sky
On Sale Feb 11, 2025, Pre-Order Today:
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New York Times bestselling author Eowyn Ivey returns to the mythical Alaska landscape of her Pulitzer Prize finalist The Snow Child with an unforgettable reimagining of Beauty and the Beast that asks the question: can love save us from ourselves?
Birdie’s keeping it together, of course she is. So she’s a little hungover sometimes on her shifts, and has to bring her daughter Emaleen to work while she waits tables at an Alaskan roadside lodge, but it’s a tough town to be a single mother and Emaleen never goes hungry. Still, she remembers happier times—trout fishing with her grandfather and hiking in the tundra—being free in the world of nature.
Arthur Neilsen is a soft-spoken recluse, with scars across his face, who brings Emaleen back to safety when she gets lost in the woods one day. He speaks with a strange cadence, appears in town only at the change of seasons, and most people avoid him. But for Birdie, he represents everything she’s ever longed for. He lives in a cabin in the mountains on the far side of the Wolverine River and tells Birdie about the caribou, marmots and wild sheep that share his untamed world. She falls in love with him and the land he knows so well.
Against the warnings of those who care about her, Birdie moves to his isolated cabin.
She and her daughter are alone with Arthur in a vast wilderness, miles from roads, telephones, electricity or outside contact, but Birdie believes she has come prepared. She can start a fire and cook on a woodstove. She has her rifle and fishing rod. In the beginning, it is an idyllic life—the three of them catch salmon, pick berries and swim in sunlit waters. But soon Birdie realizes that she is not at all prepared for what lies ahead: Arthur harbors a dark secret unlike anything she’d ever imagined; and she learns that the Alaska wilderness is as mysterious and dangerous as it is beautiful.
Black Woods, Blue Sky is a suspenseful novel with life-and-death stakes about the love between a mother and daughter, and about the lure of a wild life—about what we gain and what it might cost us.
Reviews
“What a book—I am still enthralled and haunted. Black Woods, Blue Sky is a fable about what it is to love, a tale of longing, a call to renew our deepest bonds with the living world. It will draw you along like a fast-moving stream, and you will find yourself in places you have never been.”—Louise Erdrich, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Night Watchman and National Book Award–winning author of The Round House
“A stunning tale told by a master of her craft. Black Woods, Blue Sky is what skilled storytelling is supposed to be.”—Jason Mott, National Book Award winning author of Hell of a Book, and New York Times bestselling author of The Returned
“No one writes like Eowyn Ivey. Her voice is as enchanting as it is original and Black Woods, Blue Sky may be her best novel yet. A compelling story of love and forgiveness, it is also a page turner, creating a sense of foreboding in the vast Alaskan landscape that Ivey evokes with such passion and precision.”—Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize winning author of March, and New York Times bestselling author of Horse
“Written with love for the Alaskan landscape, Black Woods, Blue Sky is a dazzling and moving journey into the reaches of the wilderness and of the human heart. Ivey’s prose is pure and authentic, drawing you in to the richness of these characters and of their lives. This one will stay with you.”—Tiffany McDaniel, internationally bestselling author of Betty, On the Savage Side, and The Summer that Melted Everything
“Entrancing, tender, bold and beautifully strange: in Black Woods, Blue Sky Eowyn Ivey does again what she does so brilliantly. Out of myth she weaves a beautiful contemporary story to delight the senses, and keep us turning, page by page, to the astounding end. She makes us think about the space where man becomes nature, and how we only learn when we listen to the world beyond our own. I read with my heart in my mouth and filled with wonder. This is a very special book.”—Rachel Joyce, New York Times bestselling author of Miss Benson’s Beetle