Set against the powerful lakeshore landscape of northern Minnesota, Safe from the Sea is a heartfelt novel in which a son returns home to reconnect with his estranged and dying father thirty-five years after the tragic wreck of a Great Lakes ore boat that the father only partially survived and that has divided them emotionally ever since. When his father for the first time finally tells the story of the horrific disaster he has carried with him so long, it leads the two men to reconsider each other. Meanwhile, Noah's own struggle to make a life with an absent father has found its real reward in his relationship with his sagacious wife, Natalie, whose complications with infertility issues have marked her husband's life in ways he only fully realizes as the reconciliation with his father takes shape. Peter Geye has delivered an archetypal story of a father and son, of the tug and pull of family bonds, of Norwegian immigrant culture, of dramatic shipwrecks and the business and adventure of Great Lakes shipping in a setting that simply casts a spell over the characters as well as the reader.
The Great Lakes give the communities at their edges both a livelihood and a source for many of their residents' deaths. After a frigate shipping ore out of a northern Minnesota port suffers a devastating wreck in SAFE FROM THE SEA, the consequences ripple through the lives of one of its survivors and his estranged son Noah. Noah's attempt to square this tragedy with his father toward the end of the old man's life frames Peter Geye's tale of grievance and barrenness, in a part of the world that is never far enough from icy water.
- Genre: Fiction + Literature Genres
- Subgenre: Literary, General
- Publisher: Unbridled Books
- Pages: 244
- Edition: Reprint
- Language: English
- Format: paperback
- Release Date: September 6, 2011
- Date Published: September 12, 2011
- Author: Peter Geye