Dave Carty – författare

Céline Vaillancourt saw the untamed forest in shades of apprehension: a dark, trackless wilderness that ran from the shore of Lake Superior to an unknown boundary on an unnavigable map. But Edmund, her 11-year-old son, was possessed of a different vision, as though, having been brought into that country as a child in his father''s arms, he had put the very same brooding colors together and produced a painting shot through with adventure and the light of discovery. There was no talking to either of them, husband or son. But talk no longer seemed to matter. Now they were in the maw of the great recession. Now her husband''s construction business, built on the housing boom in the lake-side village of Port Landing, Wisconsin, was failing. And now, on a cold, moonless night in December, on the brink of the worst that Lake Superior could throw at them, Edmund was alone in the woods, the temperature plummeting, a killing storm bearing down, with little more than his beloved Border Collie, Breeze, to keep him warm.

Jamison Everett, a shy and lonely man with few friends, is a retired high school English teacher. When his artist sister, Monna, who is suffering from Parkinson's Disease, calls and asks for his help, he reluctantly agrees to leave his apartment in Minneapolis and temporarily relocate to her remote Montana town. Perhaps, in caring for his sister, he will find the friendship he longs for. But Monna's fiercely independent husband, Ben, has a different game plan. Parkinson's has robbed Monna of her ability to paint, and if the doctors won't cure her, then by god he'll do it — by sheer force of will. Jamison, summoning his courage, offers to help, and an alliance is born. Yet neither man can know how much their nascent friendship will ask of them. Only Monna senses what is coming.