FICTION
TURNBACK RIDGE
by Gerri Brightwell
“Brightwell addresses such timely issues as climate change, healthcare, and immigration…This heartfelt tale of fatherhood will resonate with many.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a near-future Alaska in which global warming and immigration policy are wreaking havoc on lives and land, Nash Preston is trying to hold his family together. As the Alaska summer heats up, he ignores his expired visa—and now immigration bounty hunters are after him as he flees for the border with his sons. Their already fraught journey takes an alarming turn when his youngest, Robbie, picks up a mysterious fossil that makes him sick. When his boys are snatched and taken to a sinister detention facility, Nash must find a way to save them.
October 2022 | Fiction | 978-1-948814-65-2| 250 pp | $16.95
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GERRI BRIGHTWELL is the author of the novels Dead of Winter, The Dark Lantern, and Cold Country, as well as many short stories. She has master's degrees in creative writing from the University of East Anglia and the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota. Originally from southwest Britain, Brightwell has worked in Greece, Israel, Spain, Thailand, and Canada, and now lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, with her spouse, Ian C. Esslemont, and their three sons.
MORE PRAISE FOR TURNBACK RIDGE
“Brightwell’s Turnback Ridge is a triumph; a timely, terrifying thriller that calls to mind the best work of Douglas Preston and Michael Crichton. I raced through this gorgeously written, knuckle-biting, roller-coaster of a thriller at warp speed. Just read it!”
—KAREN DIONNE, USA Today bestselling author of the #1 international bestseller The Marsh King's Daughter and The Wicked Sister
“Readers will be drawn deep into this searing tale of a father’s desperate flight through a dystopian Far North filled with menace and contagion. A hard and gleaming gem of a novel.”
—SCOTT GRAHAM, National Outdoor Book Award–winning author of Canyonlands Carnage
"An ingenious book with unforgettable characters and important things to say about the bunkhouse culture of the north. Brightwell has a good eye, a sensitive heart, and a well-honed sense of justice for both human beings and the land."
—JOHN STRALEY, author of The Woman Who Married a Bear
“A loving father struggles to save himself and his two sons in this thrilling, gracefully written novel set in a futuristic Alaska warmed by climate change. Turnback Ridge is a double-edged gem—a rugged adventure story and a tantalizing mystery as the novel’s characters do their best not only to survive but to learn the secrets behind a peculiar fossil uncovered by the melting earth.”
—TONY ARDIZZONE, author of The Whale Chaser
​
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE
PLAYING WITH WILDFIRE
by LAURA PRITCHETT
When a wildfire bears down on a mountain community, residents are forced to gather for safety—resulting in a tangle of love and lust that pulls people from their isolation, friendships that form across political divides, and a new hope for rethinking the ways humans inhabit the burning planet. Playing with Wildfire is a literary landscape that is an experiment in form: an astrology report; a grant application-turned-love-story; a phone call from Mother Earth; an obituary for a wildfire; a burned mountain’s conversation with a lone woman and an injured bear. Every story captures how fire affects the human psyche and life, and how destruction can lead to renewal.
​
“​The broad sweeping compassion of this polyvocal novel takes my breath away.”
—CAMILLE T. DUNGY, author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden
THE MISSING MORNINGSTAR And Other Stories
by STACIE SHANNON DENETSOSIE
Stacie Shannon Denetsosie confronts long-reaching effects of settler-colonialism on Native lives in a series of gritty, wildly imaginative stories. A young Navajo man catches a ride home alongside a casket he’s sure contains his dead grandfather. A gas station clerk witnesses the kidnapping of the newly crowned Miss Northwestern Arizona. A young couple’s search for a sperm donor raises questions of blood quantum. This debut collection grapples with a complex and painful history alongside an inheritance of beauty, ceremony, and storytelling.
“​Propulsive and complex, this is a gorgeously written debut.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS (starred review)
