A beautiful story of hardship, resilience, determination, and love set in the hardscrabble land of Alaska just as it becomes a state. A man marries himself to a land he does not know but is determined to wrest a living from, while a girl marries a man she does not know but slowly learns to love. They learn to understand each other and make peace with the past experiences which haunt them. The desciptions are vivid; the hard work of eking out an existence on unforgiving land is both heartbreaking and triumphant. Good read for Kent Haruf fans who like character studies and elegant descriptions of natural life.