Touch

In Sawgamet, a north woods boomtown gone bust, the cold of winter breaks the glass of the schoolhouse thermometer, and the dangers of working in the cuts are overshadowed by the mysteries and magic lurking in the woods. Stephen, a pastor, is at home on the eve of his mother's funeral, thirty years after the mythic summer his grandfather returned to the town in search of his beloved but long-dead wife. And like his grandfather, Stephen is forced to confront the losses of his past.

Touch introduces you to a world where monsters and witches oppose singing dogs and golden caribou, where the living and the dead part and meet again in the crippling beauty of winter and the surreal haze of summer.

"Returning home on the eve of his mother's death, an Anglican priest is haunted by memories of his far northern Canada hometown and its intertwined history with his family in Zentner's eerie, elegiac debut. Sitting by his mother's bedside, Stephen recalls his childhood of 30 years earlier, watching the men fell trees and float the logs downriver before the winter freeze. Stephen's father, Pierre, was a logger despite his mangled hand, but after Pierre and Stephen's sister die in an ice skating accident, only stories remain of him, and Stephen later passes these along to his own daughters just as stories of Jeannot, Pierre's father who left Sawgamet when Pierre was an infant, were kept alive as family lore. Soon after Pierre's death, though, Jeannot, a town founder, reappears and insists he has returned to find his wife, though she's been dead for years. The tales he tells Stephen — of golden caribou, malevolent wood spirits, and a winter that lasted so long it buried the town in snow until July — are woven in so seamlessly that the reader never questions their validity. The rugged wilderness is captured exquisitely, as is Stephen's uncommon childhood, and despite a narrative rife with tragedy, Zentner's elegant prose keeps the story buoyant. (Apr.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright PWyxz LLC)

"A sublime haunting, a ripping yarn, and a killer debut."--J. Robert Lennon

Alexi Zentner is the winner of the 2008 Narrative Prize, and his fiction has been featured in The Atlantic and Tin House. He lives in Ithaca, New York, with his family.