Eowyn Ivey Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Eowyn Ivey (born in 1973) was raised in Alaska and continues living there with her two daughters and husband. Her mom named her after a “Lord of the Rings” character. Eowyn works at the independent bookstore Fireside Books where she plays matchmaker between books and readers.

Before her career as a bookseller and novelist, Eowyn worked for almost a decade as an award winning reporter at the Frontiersman newspaper. “The Snow Child” is informed by her life in Alaska.

Eowyn’s husband is a fishery biologist with the state of Alaska. And even though they each work outside of the home, they’re also raising their daughters in the rural and largely subsistence lifestyle in which they were each raised.

To come up with character names, she will sometimes leaf through a phone book, while other times she will pick names off the spines of her research books.

“The Snow Child” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, was an international bestseller, and it was published in twenty-six languages. It also won an Indies Choice award for debut fiction, and a PNBA Book Award winner. She won the International Author of the Year category at the National Book Awards in 2012.

Eowyn’s short fiction and essays have appeared in Sunday Times Magazine, Woman & Home Magazine, London’s Observer Magazine, Sunday Express Magazine, the anthology Cold Flashes, Five Chapters, the North Pacific Rim literary journal Cirque, and Alaska Magazine.

“The Snow Child” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2012. Alaska in 1920. A brutal place to homestead, and particularly difficult for recent arrivals Mabel and Jack. Childless, they have been drifting apart: she crumbling from despair and loneliness, while he’s breaking under the weight of all of the farm work. In a moment of levity during the first snowfall of the season, they build this child out of the snow. The very next morning the snow child is gone, yet they glimpse this young, blonde girl running through the trees.

This little girl, calling herself Faina, appears to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox by her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. While Mabel and Jack struggle to comprehend this child who could’ve steeped out of the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as though she’s their own daughter. However in such a beautiful yet violent place things are rarely ever like they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina is going to transform each of them.

This book is such a beautiful journey, with an alluring and fascinating blend of naturalism and myth. Eowyn engages your emotions right from the very beginning of the book, and her descriptions of the Alaskan wilderness were so very stunning that some even looked up pictures to see it for themselves.

“Last Days in Hunting Camp” is the first stand alone novella and was released in 2014. Walt and Millie have spent one month apart, each year of their long marriage. While Millie takes to the concert stage to perform and Walt heads off to hunt moose and bear in the pristine Alaskan wilderness. Their letters, which are picked up and delivered by some bush pilot every week, keep them close.

Walt, who is now in his seventy-sixth year, realizes that his days of hunting might soon be over, and there is a black bear prowling around his camp. Is Millie ever going to get the crumpled up letter that Walt keeps in his pocket?

“To the Bright Edge of the World” is the second stand alone novel and was released in 2016. In the winter of 1885, Colonel Allen Forrester (decorated war hero) leads a tiny group of men on an expedition which has been deemed impossible: to venture up the Wolverine River and pierce the untamed and vast Alaska Territory. Leaving his newly pregnant wife (Sophie) behind, he records his extraordinary experiences in hopes that his journal is going to reach her should he not make it back, once he passes beyond the edge of the known world, there will be no telling what awaits him.

The Wolverine River Valley isn’t just forbidding and breathtaking but it’s also horrifying in ways which the colonel and his men could never have imagined. While they map out the territory and gather up information on the native tribes, whose understanding of the natural world is unlike anything they’ve encountered before. Forrester and his men find the blurred lines between wild animal and human, the dead and living. And as the men knew they would face starvation and danger, they can’t escape from the sense that some greater and mysterious force is threatening their very lives.

At the same time, on her own back at Vancouver Barracks, Sophie is chafing under all of the social restrictions and yearns to be traveling alongside her husband. She does not yet know that the winter is going to require just as much of her as it does of her husband. And that both her faith and courage is going to be tested right to the breaking point. Can her exploration of nature through the new art of photography help her to rediscover her sense of wonder and beauty?

The truths which Sophie and Allen discover over the course of this fateful year change each of their lives, and the lives of those that will hear their stories long after they are gone, forever.

This is an epic adventure tale which seems to heir to the tradition of Melville’s own ambitious and sweeping literary approach to the age old struggles of human versus nature. It’s really a high stakes and absorbing read.

This is a beautifully told story and Ivey’s prose is so utterly captivating. She has this uncanny ability to seamlessly weave in fable, myth, and folklore into her stories. Readers were drawn into this one because of how much they came to adore Sophie and Allen as a pair. Even though they’re separated the whole book, and yet there’s this tenderness about them.