Peter Geye

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Lucas Botz

Author Peter Geye.

Peter Geye

Lifelong Minneapolis resident Peter Geye (rhymes with “eye”) has written the perfect novel to help readers get excited about another Wisconsin winter. The Ski Jumpers, his fifth book, tells the story of a ski-jumping family. The narrative alternates between a ruinous past and a precarious present, punctuated by the narrator’s terminal diagnosis of younger-onset Alzheimer’s. Geye is a former ski jumper, just like the book’s narrator, and his experience allows descriptions of the sport to soar sky-high. Then there’s this: The title of the book the narrator is struggling to write before he dies just happens to be The Ski Jumpers. How meta!

media release: Minnesota author Peter Geye will be at Leopold's Books Bar Cáffe (1301 Regent Street, Madison, WI 53715) on Friday, September 23, 2022, at 6:00 pm CT, and Arcadia Books (102 E Jefferson St, Spring Green, WI 53588) on Saturday, September 24, 2022, at 3:00 PM CT for events that are part of his fall book tour for his newest novel, The Ski Jumpers. Geye will discuss and read from the book, as well as answer audience questions. A signing will follow the presentations. Raised a ski jumper himself, Geye is excited to share his new book with readers. The events are free and open to the public.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

A brilliant ski jumper has to be fearless—Jon Bargaard remembers this well. His memories of daring leaps and risks might be the key to the book he’s always wanted to write: a novel about his family, beginning with Pops, once a champion ski jumper himself, who also took Jon and his younger brother Anton to the heights. But Jon has never been able to get past the next, ruinous episode of their history, and now that he has received a terrible diagnosis, he’s afraid he never will.

In a bravura performance, Peter Geye follows Jon deep into the past he tried so hard to leave behind, telling the story he spent his life escaping. It begins with a flourish, his father and his hard-won sweetheart fleeing Chicago, and a notoriously ruthless gangster, to land in North Minneapolis. That, at least, was the tale Jon heard, one that becomes more and more suspect as he revisits the events that eventually tore the family in two, sending his father to prison, his mother to the state hospital, and placing himself, a teenager, in charge of thirteen-year-old Anton. Traveling back and forth in time, Jon tells his family’s story—perhaps his last chance to share it—to his beloved wife Ingrid, circling ever closer to the truth about those events and his own part in them, and revealing the perhaps unforgivable violence done to the brothers’ bond.

The dream of ski jumping haunts Jon as his tale unfolds, daring time to stop just long enough to stick the landing. As thrilling as those soaring flights, as precarious as the Bargaard family’s complicated love, as tender as Jon’s backward gaze while disease takes him inexorably forward, Peter Geye’s gorgeous prose brings the brothers to the precipice of their relationship, where they have to choose: each other, or the secrets they’ve held so tightly for so long.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 

Peter Geye is author of the award-winning novels Safe from the Sea, The Lighthouse Road, Wintering (winner of the Minnesota Book Award), and Northernmost. He teaches the yearlong Novel Writing Project at the Loft Literary Center. Born and raised in Minneapolis, he continues to live there with his family.