Leif Enger

Biography

Leif Enger was born in 1961 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, to Don and Wilma Enger, a band leader and a teacher, respectively, at Osakis High School. A graduate of Moorhead State University, Enger worked as a reporter and producer for the Minnesota Public Radio program Mainstreet Radio for sixteen years before the success of Peace Like a River. Writing with his brother Lin under the pen name L. L. Enger, Enger co-wrote five mystery novels about a retired baseball player named Gun Pedersen for Pocket and Simon & Schuster in the early 1990s.

Enger met his wife Robin Reed when they were both students at Moorhead State University , he studying English and she studying education. They currently live on a 56-acre tract that includes farmland and forest near Aitkin, Minnesota.They have two home-schooled sons, Ty and John. Peace Like a River is Enger's debut novel.

His second novel, set to be published by Grove/Atlantic in early 2008, is the story of an aging train robber who finds himself shadowed by the law after years of obscurity. Set in early twentieth-century America, the title is So Brave, Young and Handsome.

Peace Like A River

Leif Enger's best-selling debut is an epic of generosity and heart that reminds us of the restorative power of great literature. This story of a father raising his three children in 1960's Minnesota is at once a heroic quest, a tragedy, a love story and a haunting meditation on the possibility of magic in everyday life.

Enger brings us eleven-year-old Reuben Land, an asthmatic boy who has reason to believe in miracles. The Land family enjoy an idyllic existence until the oldest son, Davy, is arrested for a double manslaughter. But when Davy breaks out of jail and flees into the Dakota badlands, Reuben finds himself along with his sister and father on a cross-country search for his outlaw older brother. Their epic journey leads them to a place from which there is no return, a place that will test them almost beyond endurance and stretch the ties that bind them to their absolute limit. Their journey unfolds like a revelation, and its conclusion shows how family, love, and faith can stand up to the most terrifying of enemies, the most tragic of fates.

Website Links:

Writers and Books Website

Interview with Leif Enger

Reading Guide to Enger's Work