William Kent Krueger

This year marks the arrival of Kent Krueger’s highly-anticipated standalone novel, This Tender Land, a coming-of-age tale about a band of four children and a horrific crime that sets them on a journey down the Mississippi à la Huckleberry Finn.

- Teri Duerr

Marketed as a “companion” novel to the author’s 2013 breakout book Ordinary Grace, which sold nearly a million copies and earned the author a Macavity, a Dilys, a Barry, an Anthony, and Krueger’s first-ever Edgar Award for Best Novel, This Tender Land is narrated by a grown Odie O’Banion recounting his fateful twelfth summer. It follows the adventures of brothers Odie and Albert, their best friend Moses, and adopted little sister Emmy. This Tender Land is a work of sympathetic imagination set in 1932 and woven with a touch of the mystical and spiritual, and threaded throughout with American music and folklore.

As with Krueger’s long-running and well-loved Corcoran O’Connor series that features a half-Ojibwe, half-Irish Catholic sheriff turned-private eye, This Tender Land is set in the author’s home state of Minnesota. But unlike the Cork series, which for most of its 17 novels (and counting) has centered around the deep, green wilds of Minnesota’s Northwoods, This Tender Land unspools against the backdrop of the Great Depression in the same rural river valley of Ordinary Grace’s southern Minnesota. It’s a setting not so different from the numerous small towns of the author’s own youth in rural Oregon and neighboring states.

It’s more than fitting then, that it’s here in St. Paul among the Minnesota coneflowers and allium of Krueger’s own backyard that the author sits down to discuss his new book, which among many things, is at its heart a meditation on family and home—both those we are born into and those we choose.