That night he sees the old man sitting in a spruce tree, roosting like a huge bird. Things don’t look good on this first night: Forrester had been counting on Eyak men to serve as guides, but most of the men have gone off hunting sea otter, leaving only three Eyak boys too young for the hunt and one old man with a deformed leg. A few Russians attempted a similar mission when Alaska was still Russian territory, and most of them died in the attempt. He has left Sophie behind at Vancouver Barracks and gone to explore the Wolverine River valley, to survey it, map it and report what he finds. Forrester’s journal begins in March of 1885, on Perkins Island in Prince William Sound, Alaska. The story is also framed with correspondence from an elderly man, Walter Forrester, who is the couple’s great-nephew.Ĭol.

Novelist Eowyn Ivey tells their twin stories through letters and journals, seen through the eyes of Joshua Sloan, a young museum curator going through a box of their effects. He and his small party explore a land that is magnificent and terrifying, beautiful and deadly, encountering glimpses of phenomena that seem supernatural, even to this supremely rational man. Allen Forrester, is leading an expedition to explore what many considered the edge of the world: the Wolverine River valley in the interior of Alaska, an area unseen by White Americans until then. Sophie knows the light was only the effect of a sunbeam glancing off a branch, but the sliver of light makes the photo extraordinary, even transcendent.Īt the same time, her husband, U.S. A pioneering nature photographer, Sophie Forrester, takes an unusual picture of a young hummingbird, showing a bright blade of light along the tiny fledgling’s wing as it takes flight for the first time. What is the bright edge of the world? This novel shows us at least two possibilities: the geographic edge of the explored world and the illumination at the edge of what is familiar.

To the bright edge of the world