On the rocky shores of Lake Superior, a piercing story of selfhood and determinism develops: is the future what we’re handed or what we make of it?
It’s 1910, and Theodulf Sauer has finally achieved a position befitting his ego: master lighthouse keeper at a newly commissioned station towering above Lake Superior. When his new wife, Willa, arrives on the first spring ferry, it’s clear her life has taken the opposite turn: after being summoned home from college to Duluth when her father dies, she and her scheming mother find themselves destitute, and Willa is rushed into this ill-suited arranged marriage before she can comprehend her fate.
As the lighthouse station establishes, the new relationship teeters between tense and hostile, with little mutual understanding or tenderness. Willa takes solace in her learned fascination with the cosmos, especially (despite her husband’s suspicion of the event) in viewing the imminent Halley’s Comet. Under ominous night skies, Theodulf stands sentry over the lake, clinging to long-ago and faraway memories of happiness that fill him with longing and shame.
Into this impasse, a clairvoyant girl and her resolute uncle emerge from across the cove. They see through the Sauers’ thin façade and, by turns and in different ways, convey promise, sympathy, and insight that counter Willa’s despair. Armed with renewed self-determination, Willa forges a path to happiness. But before she can grasp it, tragedy comes to their remote beacon, and her future plunges toward a dark unknown.
Set against a brooding and beautiful landscape, A Lesser Light is a story about industry and calamity, science versus superstition, inner desire countered with societal expectations—and the consequences when these forces collide in the wilderness of rapid social change.
Genre: Historical
It’s 1910, and Theodulf Sauer has finally achieved a position befitting his ego: master lighthouse keeper at a newly commissioned station towering above Lake Superior. When his new wife, Willa, arrives on the first spring ferry, it’s clear her life has taken the opposite turn: after being summoned home from college to Duluth when her father dies, she and her scheming mother find themselves destitute, and Willa is rushed into this ill-suited arranged marriage before she can comprehend her fate.
As the lighthouse station establishes, the new relationship teeters between tense and hostile, with little mutual understanding or tenderness. Willa takes solace in her learned fascination with the cosmos, especially (despite her husband’s suspicion of the event) in viewing the imminent Halley’s Comet. Under ominous night skies, Theodulf stands sentry over the lake, clinging to long-ago and faraway memories of happiness that fill him with longing and shame.
Into this impasse, a clairvoyant girl and her resolute uncle emerge from across the cove. They see through the Sauers’ thin façade and, by turns and in different ways, convey promise, sympathy, and insight that counter Willa’s despair. Armed with renewed self-determination, Willa forges a path to happiness. But before she can grasp it, tragedy comes to their remote beacon, and her future plunges toward a dark unknown.
Set against a brooding and beautiful landscape, A Lesser Light is a story about industry and calamity, science versus superstition, inner desire countered with societal expectations—and the consequences when these forces collide in the wilderness of rapid social change.
Genre: Historical
Praise for this book
"Peter Geye's A Lesser Light has elemental forces within it, powered by weather, Lake Superior, and the conflicts of religion and the heart in the early parts of the twentieth century. This book has qualities that may remind some readers of the novels of Thomas Hardy: a strong woman who is far from the life of the crowd, a detailed attention to work, and a fascinating cast of major and minor characters. This novel is a great feat of literary imagination." - Charles Baxter
"In this tempest of a novel, Peter Geye has bound together husband and wife on the bleak cliffside of an ill-suited marriage, where wolves howl, shipwrecks haunt, lovers meet in secret, and hope arcs in stardust. I will never forget this achingly beautiful story with its prose that sings through the soul." - Carol Dunbar
"In A Lesser Light, Peter Geye paints an unforgettable picture of Minnesota, one in which history leaps to life. This wonderful book presents a completely immersive and absorbing world, masterfully rendered. With tenderness, humor, and deep insight, Geye traces the paths of a community living around and in service to a lighthouse, among them a stern and religious keeper; his prickly, lonely new wife; a local man unexpectedly a guardian to his orphaned niece; and the niece herself, each of them keeping secrets and struggling to face the future. Their choices make for a surprising literary page-turner that - like all good historical fiction - teaches us how to live in the present." - V V Ganeshananthan
"Reading this book felt like watching some rare celestial event: sky-big, beautiful and strangely tender, and full of a kind of magic at the edge of things that's impossible to describe and changes you forever to witness." - Amber Sparks
"In this tempest of a novel, Peter Geye has bound together husband and wife on the bleak cliffside of an ill-suited marriage, where wolves howl, shipwrecks haunt, lovers meet in secret, and hope arcs in stardust. I will never forget this achingly beautiful story with its prose that sings through the soul." - Carol Dunbar
"In A Lesser Light, Peter Geye paints an unforgettable picture of Minnesota, one in which history leaps to life. This wonderful book presents a completely immersive and absorbing world, masterfully rendered. With tenderness, humor, and deep insight, Geye traces the paths of a community living around and in service to a lighthouse, among them a stern and religious keeper; his prickly, lonely new wife; a local man unexpectedly a guardian to his orphaned niece; and the niece herself, each of them keeping secrets and struggling to face the future. Their choices make for a surprising literary page-turner that - like all good historical fiction - teaches us how to live in the present." - V V Ganeshananthan
"Reading this book felt like watching some rare celestial event: sky-big, beautiful and strangely tender, and full of a kind of magic at the edge of things that's impossible to describe and changes you forever to witness." - Amber Sparks
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