North of Hope

Synopsis

Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as a “writer good enough to restore your faith in fiction,” Jon Hassler has established himself as a contemporary literary master. With North of Hope, he surpasses his own previous work, both in scope and intensity. Set in the scrubby, jackpine-speckled landscape of northern Minnesota—a place that will have a profound effect on the characters’ lives—this beautifully written, deeply moving novel is the crowning achievement of an already distinguished career. After more than twenty years in the priesthood, Father Frank Healy is going home. Emulating the hero of his youth, a nineteenth-century missionary named Father Zell, Frank is bringing Catholicism to the Ojibway Indians living on the Basswood reservation in the north woods. But what Father Healy finds when he arrives at the battered Church of Our Lady are very few believers and a woman from his past—the woman from his past—whom he thought he’d never see again. Frank thought Libby Girard more beautiful than Jennifer Jones when he first laid eyes on her in the Royal movie theater in 1949. In the intervening years, Libby has been chasing after the happy family life she never had in her violent childhood home, and her search for love has born bitter fruit: a crumbling marriage to a doctor named Tom Pearsall and her daughter Vema, a wild young woman with a long history of crippling mental illness. It is clear to Frank that Libby’s life is unraveling. And as she slowly becomes dependent on him, the lives around them erupt in a tangle of drugs and despair, alcoholism and death. In North of Hope, Jon Hassler has written with great sensitivity about the divinity of the human spirit, and how faith can ennoble the most hopeless life. The Cleveland Plain Dealer has proclaimed Hassler “one of America’s most completely satisfying novelists,” and North of Hope is his most completely satisfying, and thoroughly realized novel.

Copyright:

1990

Book Details

Book Quality:

Excellent

Book Size:

518 Pages

ISBN-13:

9780345369109

Publisher:

Random House Publishing Group

Date of Addition:

12/09/19

Copyrighted By:

Jon Hassler

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Literature and Fiction, Religion and Spirituality

Submitted By:

Larry Lumpkin

Proofread By:

Sister M. Dolores Dean

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.