Hi,

For Christmas I got a book that had been on my wish list since I first heard about its upcoming publication: Eowyn Ivey’s latest novel To the Bright Edge of the World. I’m glad that I finally got a chance to read it.

Alaska, 1885. Lieutenant Colonel Allen Forrester and his handful of men are on their way to try the impossible. They want to scout the newly acquired territory with large uncharted parts that lay beyond the Wolverine River.
At the same time Allen’s wife Sophie has to sit tight at Vancouver Barracks in Oregon, where she is torn between disappointment at not being able to accompany her husband to Alaska, and the anticipation of the upcoming birth of their first child.

To the Bright Edge of the World is an Epistolary Novel that is largely told using Allen and Sophie’s diary entries. The frame story is set in the present, where Allen’s great-nephew Walter from Montana and Josh, a museum curator from Alaska, exchange letters about Sophie’s and Allen’s legacy. While their correspondence complements the plot at first, it gets a bit too much near the end of the novel.

It took me quite some time to warm up to Bright Edge to be honest, but when I did, I was hooked and didn’t want to go to sleep. I wanted to know more about the characters’ fate, wanted to see how clever Sophie dealt with the boring life at the barracks, wanted to accompany Allen and his men through snow and ice in Alaska spring, marveling at the breathtaking and solitary landscape. So every time I opened the book I almost felt like Josh the museum curator.

With To the Bright Edge of the World Eowyn Ivey has created an epistolary novel that reads so convincingly that I almost believed the journal entries and letters to be real. Even though it is inspired by Lieutenant Henry T. Allen’s journey into Alaska, I had to remind myself more than once that this book is a work of fiction and that the magical elements in the story are too good to be true. So if you’re up for an adventure and love the North as much as I do you’re in for a treat.

¹ https://www.headline.co.uk/books/detail.page?isbn=9781472208606