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 live on a 56-acre tract that includes farmland and forest near Aitkin, Minnesota, and have two sons. Peace Like a River was Enger's debut novel. His second novel, So Brave, Young and Handsome: A Novel, was published by Grove/Atlantic in 2008. Set in early twentieth-century America, it tells the story of an aging train robber who finds himself shadowed by the law after years of obscurity.
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
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