Excerpt from The High Divide by Lin Enger, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But who was this Laura Powers from Bismarck, and how had his father come to know her? Why would he go and visit her? What did she have to do with anything related to their family? And what did that mean: a burst of sun in a long gray season?

Eli supposed the right thing to do was to take the letter home and show it to his mother, yet he dismissed the notion out of hand, because he knew this about women, or thought he did—that jealousy could make them incautious and at times irrational. If he showed her the letter, she'd likely decide that Ulysses was lost to her and give up on him, and then, when he did come home, confront him in a way that would drive him off for good.

In the first days of his father's absence, Eli had decided he was obliged, on behalf of his mother, to go off and find him. Each week he'd put aside from his wages a dollar and a half and hid it in the loft where he and Danny slept, behind a loose board in the wall. The money was still there, more of it now. He checked on it every day, counted it to make sure his brother hadn't stumbled across it. He'd also squirreled away a loaf of his mother's bread and half a dozen eggs that he boiled up one day while she weeded the garden. Then late one night in the middle of August—it was the same night the summer's long pattern of windless days and thick fogs finally broke—he'd stolen outside and sneaked through town to the depot, where he waited behind the water tank for the eastbound night freight. Partly it was the weather—rain, lightning, a terrific wind—and partly the fear of leaving his mother and brother behind, but mostly it was the image of himself in a rattling boxcar, alone and hurtling east toward St. Paul, a city he'd never visited, that made him turn around and walk back home in the driving rain. There was no evidence, after all, beyond his mother's hunch, that St. Paul was the place to start looking. In fact next time he'd be heading west when he left, not east, his destination certain—at least the first leg of it would be—and nothing was going to stop him.

Excerpted from The High Divide by Lin Enger. Copyright © 2014 by Lin Enger. Excerpted by permission of Algonquin Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.