Undiscovered Country Book

While hunting in the cold northern Minnesota woods, seventeen-year-old Jesse Matson's life is forever changed when he discovers his father, dead by a self-inflicted rifle wound to the head.

But would easygoing Harold Matson really kill himself? If so, why? And just where was Jesse's uncle Clay--always jealous of Harold, and a bit too friendly with Jesse's mother--that cold afternoon?

Haunted by the ghost of his father, Jesse searches deeper into the secrets his family holds, and must decide what he will and will not take into his own hands. Written with a simple elegance, UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY is a hair-bristling story of betrayal, revenge, and the possibilities of forgiveness-and the riveting portrait of a young man trying to hold his family together in a world tipped suddenly upside down.

Publishers Weekly

With flashes of prose as crisp and haunting as the frozen Minnesota setting, Enger's debut opens 10 years after Jesse Matson's father's alleged suicide, as 17-year-old Jesse sits down to write his own version of events. While hunting with his father in the woods surrounding their hometown of Battlepoint, Minn., the young Jesse hears a shot and finds his father dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. Adamant that his father could never take his own life, Jesse determines to uncover the truth. While his mother, Genevieve, retreats to her room and his younger brother, Magnus, looks to him for reassurance, Jesse becomes convinced that his uncle Clay actually killed his father. Despite a lack of evidence or support from law enforcement, Jesse hatches a plan to avenge his father's death, bolstered by his deepening relationship with a girl who has plenty of problems of her own. Allusions to Hamlet and Hemingway's In Our Time(Jesse reads both in school) do a little too much foreshadowing, but the landscape is beautifully rendered, and Jesse's confusion is palpable. (July)

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