RETURNING TO EARTH

Now in paperback, Jim Harrison’s Returning to Earth has been universally praised, and is one of his most popular recent books. In Returning to Earth, Harrison has delivered a masterpiece—a tender, profound, and magnificent novel about life, death, and how it is sometimes possible to find redemption in unlikely places. Donald is a middle-aged Chippewa-Finnish man, married to a white woman who renounced the wealth she was raised with, and father to two grown children. As Returning to Earth opens he is slowly dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease. His condition deteriorating, he realizes no one alive will be able to pass on to his children their family history once he is gone. He begins dictating to his wife, Cynthia, stories he has never shared with anyone—as around him, his family struggles with how to lay him to rest with the same dignity with which he has always lived. Over the course of the year following Donald’s death, his loved ones struggle with how to let him go. His daughter begins studying Chippewa ideas of death for clues about her father’s religion, and her mother is at loose ends for how to protect or guide her. Bereft of the family she created to escape the malevolent influence of her own father, Cynthia, along with her brother, David, an eccentric whose life mission is to prevent Mexican border–crossers from dying in transit, find, all these years later, that redeeming the past is not a lost cause. Returning to Earth is a deeply moving book about origins and endings, how to make sense of loss, and how to live with honor for the dead. It is among the finest novels of Harrison’s long, storied career, and confirms his standing as one of the most important American writers now working.