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The Boy Who Invented Skiing

The Woman Who Lives in the Earth

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The Lake Dreams the Sky is set near a deep mountain lake in Montana. After twenty-three years away, Liz, a Boston businesswoman, returns to visit her eccentric grandmother, seeking solace from the lake that made her first believe the world was alive and aware.

Among her long-stored treasures she finds a primitive painting of a woman that reminds her of a legend from childhood; a romance about lovers whose passion sets the lake on fire. The heart of the novel is that love story, of a post-World War II affair between Rose, a local waitress raised by Indians, and a drifter named Cody. Their defiance of society's unwritten rules makes these lovers outlaws in an unforgiving time.

The Lake Dreams the Sky indelibly conjures a landscape of passion, shifting perception, and the visceral longings that shape our lives.

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"In The Woman Who Lives In the Earth, Swain Wolfe introduced himself as a writer of great imagination and sensitivity. Now...he proves himself to be a storyteller of awesome proportions."

-- James Welch, author of Fools Crow

 

"The Lake Dreams the Sky is about the clash between a remnant tribal culture and the nonculture of the Western town. But greater than its clash is its sentence-by-sentence music. Swain Wolfe's voice--with its quiet slippings into myth, eroticism, vision, dream--bends the mind the way a prism bends light or a blues man his guitar strings....Mr. Wolfe, for my money, is the most formidable Montana late-bloomer since Norman Maclean."

-- David James Duncan, author of  The River Why

 

"An irresistible novel about the pleasures of falling in love, the tensile bond between women of kin, and the pain of discovering just what it means to be an outlaw, just how dangerous it is to break the rules."

 -- Sandra Scofield, author of Plain Seeing

 

"Swain Wolfe is a magician--his hypnotic prose makes the familiar strange, the strange familiar."

-- Rick DeMarinis, author of Coming Triumph of   the Free World

 

New York Times Review

Charles de Lint  Review in F&FS

BookIdeas Review