Publisher Description
"Mette Iversdatter's window was a porthole on the winter sky." Larry Woiwode brings us into the simple and anxious rhythms of life for a Norwegian farm girl in the first decade of the twentieth century. Christmas Eve falls in the midst of deprivation as Mette's family prepares to journey to her grandparent's farm. When her father fails to bag a big deer on the journey, they arrive, like everyone else, almost empty-handed. Yet despite frustration and disappointment, this extended family combines their meager resources to create an unexpected marvel that transforms the family's Christmas. Sharply observed and crisply written, Woiwode's story throbs with truths known to human hearts in any century. He carefully renders the hesitant hopes of a child, the aching disappointments and steady perseverance of her elders, and the surprise of beauty and joy. That prayers may yet be answered--that the provision may be greater even than the promise--is a truth for Christmas and always.
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About Larry Woiwode
Larry Alfred Woiwode is an American
writer who lives in North Dakota, where he has been the state’s Poet Laureate
since 1995. His work has appeared in the New
Yorker, Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Gentleman’s
Quarterly, Partisan Review, and Paris Review. He is the author of
several novels and short stories collections, as well as a biography of the
Gold Seal founder and entrepreneur, Harold Schafer, a book of poetry, and many reviews
and essays that have appeared in dozens of publications, including the New York Times and Washington Post Book World. He has served as Writer in Residence at
the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and conducted summer sessions as a
professor at Wheaton College, Chicago, and the C. S. Lewis Seminars at
Cambridge. Woiwode has also conducted seminars and workshops in across the United
States and Canada, as well as in England, Lithuania and Scandinavia.