Homestead

From National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree and Flannery O'Connor Award winner Melinda Moustakis, a debut novel set in 1950s Alaska in the years leading up to statehood, about the turbulent marriage of two unlikely homesteaders

150 acres of Alaskan wilderness. For Lawrence, the parcel is opportunity. A piece carved out of a world that has never given him even the meager bit promised. For Marie, marrying the implacable man she meets at the Moose Lodge is a chance she takes almost without thinking. It might be an escape from a life that spins out emptily in front of her and an uncertain bet is better than none at all. Together in a territory on the verge of statehood and unshakeable change, they're tasked with shaping and settling a brutal and stolen land, and with tending a new marriage and fitting their damaged, hard-wrought lives together. But can they face the implacable without and within and make something new, or will they break apart trying?

At once an elemental and transporting depiction of an uncompromising place subject to the inescapable warp of America's civilizing impulse and a complex portrait of the white-hot crucible of early marriage, Melinda Moustakis' debut novel is painfully, joyfully alive to small intimacies and sweeping currents. Homestead is an unflinching vision of a new state and of the hard-fought, hard-bitten work of making a place.