A remarkable debut novel, evoking the harsh beauty of the Alaskan wilderness and the passions of its maverick inhabitants. True North is a literary adventure novel-lean and elegantly lyrical-that showcases Kimberly Kafka's intimate knowledge of life in Alaska. Bailey Lockhart flees a tragedy in Maine to become a bush pilot in Alaska, where she buys the only piece of land not owned by the Native American Ingalik tribe among thousands of acres in the area. The tribe's center and the home of Bailey's closest neighbors is a village eighty miles downriver, governed by fellow bush pilot and Dartmouth-educated Ingalik activist Kash. Kash and Bailey are inexorably drawn to each other, but are kept apart by habits of solitude and a political hornets' nest of racial division. Racial mistrust builds when a young white couple arrive for a "wilderness adventure." The couple's deceit and hubris will cost a life, force Kash to face the conflicts in the tribe and in his heart, and destroy Bailey's carefully constructed refuge in a head-on crash with the past she had fought to escape. - from Amzon