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1 week ago | 
adn.com | Nancy Lord
“Still Water Carving Light”By Peggy Shumaker; Red Hen Press, 2025; 112 pages; $17.95. “The Nancy Poems”By John Morgan; Cirque Press, 2024; 31 pages; $10. Peggy Shumaker, a stalwart supporter of Alaska writers and the larger arts community, is a professor emerita from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a former Alaska writer laureate.
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1 month ago | 
adn.com | Nancy Lord |Betsy Longenbaugh
“Death in the Underworld: An Alaska Murder Mystery”By Betsy Longenbaugh; Epicenter Press, 2025; 260 pages; $18.95 paperback, $6.99 Ebook. Betsy Longenbaugh, a resident of Douglas, honed her writing skills as a newspaper reporter and in more recent years has researched and written about famous Alaska murders.
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2 months ago | 
adn.com | Nancy Lord |Eowyn Ivey
“Black Woods, Blue Sky”By Eowyn Ivey; Random House, 2025; 306 pages; $29. Eowyn Ivey’s debut novel “The Snow Child,” in 2012, became an international bestseller and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Based on a Russian folk tale but set on an Alaska homestead in the 1920s, that book combined a sense of magic with the real world of a wilderness homestead and the lives of an aging, childless couple.
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Nov 8, 2024 | 
adn.com | Nancy Lord |John Straley
“Big Breath In”By John Straley; Soho Press, 2024; 288 pages; $28.95. John Straley, the acclaimed Alaska author of 13 crime novels in two series, is back with a stand-alone novel. Straley’s previous books, which most recently include “So Far and Good” and “Blown by the Same Wind,” have always drawn upon his experience working as a criminal defense investigator. He’s also made considerable use of the setting, particularly the rain-soaked environment of Southeast Alaska.
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Oct 12, 2024 | 
adn.com | Nancy Lord |Ned Rozell
“Summer of Gravel and Steel: a thru-hike of Alaska, 20 years after the first”By Ned Rozell; self-published, 2024; 346 pages; $25 paperback, $15 Kindle. Fairbanksan Ned Rozell is perhaps best known for the science and natural articles he writes for the University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute (which are distributed to Alaska newspapers) and his earlier book “Walking My Dog, Jane.” He now refers to that earlier book as a “prequel” to his new one.
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Sep 28, 2024 | 
adn.com | Nancy Lord |Sara Berg
“Kissing Kevin: An American Nurse in the Vietnam War”By Sara Berg; Cirque Press, 2024; 114 pages; $15; Black and white photos by the author. In 1970, Sara Berg, a 21-year-old straight out of nursing school and encouraged by recruiters to be patriotic and save lives, enlisted as an Army nurse. Her assignment was to the 24th Evacuation Hospital in Long Binh, Vietnam, just south of Saigon. In her new memoir, she describes her work during that year and how it changed her life forever.
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Aug 31, 2024 | 
adn.com | Nancy Lord |Bill Streever |Pegasus Books
“A Sea Full of Turtles: The Search for Optimism in an Epoch of Extinction”By Bill Streever; Pegasus Books, 2024; 256 pages; $28.95. Bill Streever, author of “Cold,” “Heat” and other science-related books, is a biologist who splits his time between Alaska and sailboat cruising in warmer waters. When the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020, he and his wife sequestered themselves in the Gulf of California (also known as the Sea of Cortez), the inland sea between Mexico’s Baja Peninsula and the mainland.
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Jul 19, 2024 | 
adn.com | Nancy Lord
“Gagaan X’usyee: Below the Foot of the Sun”By X’unei Lance Twitchell; University of Alaska Press, 2024; 92 pages; $16.95 paperback, $13.95 Ebook. X’unei Lance Twitchell’s long-awaited first poetry book presents creative work drawn from his years of contemplating his life as an Indigenous man, his knowledge of the Lingit language and his advocacy for Native language revitalization, and his deep-felt considerations of cultural losses and resilience.
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Jun 22, 2024 | 
adn.com | Nancy Lord |Jennifer Brice
“Another North: Essays in Praise of the World That Is”By Jennifer Brice; Boreal Books/Red Hen Press, 2024; 240 pages; $17.95.
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Jun 8, 2024 | 
adn.com | Nancy Lord |Matt Riordan
“The North Line”By Matt Riordan; Hyperion Avenue, 2024; 313 pages; $27.99. In the first pages of this novel about a greenhorn’s Bristol Bay fishing season, the young man pushes a skiff off the beach and ends up in the water himself. He’s warned by his crewmates that he “broke the cardinal rule. You don’t ever go in the water.” Like the narrative principle known as “Chekhov’s gun,” this loaded gun returns at the end of the novel in a dramatic fashion, but not as a reader might have imagined.
