Undiscovered Country

With flashes of prose as crisp and haunting as the frozen Minnesota setting, Enger’s debut opens 10 years after Jesse Matson’s father’s alleged suicide, as 17-year-old Jesse sits down to write his own version of events. While hunting with his father in the woods surrounding their hometown of Battlepoint, Minn., the young Jesse hears a shot and finds his father dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. Adamant that his father could never take his own life, Jesse determines to uncover the truth. While his mother, Genevieve, retreats to her room and his younger brother, Magnus, looks to him for reassurance, Jesse becomes convinced that his uncle Clay actually killed his father. Despite a lack of evidence or support from law enforcement, Jesse hatches a plan to avenge his father’s death, bolstered by his deepening relationship with a girl who has plenty of problems of her own. Allusions to Hamlet and Hemingway’s In Our Time (Jesse reads both in school) do a little too much foreshadowing, but the landscape is beautifully rendered, and Jesse’s confusion is palpable. (July)