Synopses & Reviews
What happens when a trained killer discovers that his true vocation is love? Having survived the killing fields of World War I, Fidelis Waldvogel returns home to his quiet German village and marries the pregnant widow of his best friend who was killed in action.
With a suitcase full of sausages and a master butcher's precious set of knives, Fidelis sets out for America, getting as far as North Dakota, where he builds a business, a home for his family -- which includes Eva and four sons -- and a singing club consisting of the best voices in town.
When the Old World meets the New -- in the person of Del-phine Watzka -- the great adventure of Fidelis's life begins. Delphine meets Eva and is enchanted; she meets Fidelis, and the ground trembles. These momentous encounters will determine the course of Delphine's life -- and the trajectory of this brilliant new novel by Louise Erdrich
Review
"[A]lmost unimaginably rich....Delphine is a great character....And she's the moral center of a sprawling anecdotal story crammed with unexpected twists and vivid secondary characters...crowned by a stunningly revelatory surprise ending....[A] thoughtful, artful, painfully moving addition to an ongoing American saga." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"[E]motionally powerful, richly detailed....Erdrich gives us one of her finest characters in the radiant Delphine...while also creating a host of truly remarkable secondary characters....It's clear that Erdrich, one of our finest writers, is working at the very peak of her considerable powers." Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist
Review
"A substantial, beautifully composed, confident work of art...both expansive in its reach and intimate in its intense focus." O: The Oprah Magazine
Synopsis
What happens when a trained killer discovers that his true vocation is love? Having survived the killing fields of World War I, Fidelis Waldvogel returns home to his quiet German village and marries the pregnant widow of his best friend who was killed in action.
With a suitcase full of sausages and a master butcher's precious set of knives, Fidelis sets out for America, getting as far as North Dakota, where he builds a business, a home for his family -- which includes Eva and four sons -- and a singing club consisting of the best voices in town.
When the Old World meets the New -- in the person of Del-phine Watzka -- the great adventure of Fidelis's life begins. Delphine meets Eva and is enchanted; she meets Fidelis, and the ground trembles. These momentous encounters will determine the course of Delphine's life -- and the trajectory of this brilliant new novel by Louise Erdrich
Synopsis
Requires Adobe Reader 6.0 (file size: 1294 KB) or Palm Reader (file size: 460 KB).
About the Author
Louise Erdrich lives with her family and their dogs in Minnesota. Ms. Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. She grew up in North Dakota and is of German-American and Chippewa descent. She is the author of many critically acclaimed and
New York Times best-selling novels for adults, including
Love Medicine, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her latest novel
The Plague of Doves, also published by HarperCollins.
The Porcupine Year continues the story that began with The Birchbark House, a National Book Award finalist, and The Game of Silence, winner of the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, and was inspired when Ms. Erdrich and her mother, Rita Gourneau Erdrich, were researching their own family history.