Homestead

Reviews

“Inspired by Moustakis’ own family history and set during the Alaskan Territory’s bid for statehood, this stunning debut novel considers what it truly means to own land. Recommended for fans of Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone.”
—Booklist (starred review)

“Moustakis shines in her debut…The wondrous descriptions of the back-breaking labor involved in clearing and farming the land, and of the region’s vast beauty, will make readers feel like they’re there. This evocative, well-drawn account of Alaska’s American settlers is so convincing it ought to come with a pair of mittens.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Moustakis’s writing is so good, so precise, so strong, and so deeply felt that it immediately creates a sense of time and place, and builds a quiet suspense about Marie and taciturn Lawrence. Homestead manages to be laconic and wry and visceral and primal and almost subversive in its depiction of marriage as a lovely, profound hardship.”
—Jess Walter, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Cold Millions and Beautiful Ruins

“Moustakis is a writer of singular beauty, whether turning her attention to the Alaskan landscape or the intimate landscape of a marriage. Homestead is a luminous consideration of what it means for something or someone to belong to someone else, and of how fraught and tentative the labor of longing and belonging can be.”
—Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections

“I loved this book. The marriage is feral, the child-rearing frost-bitten, the betrayals and redemptions jagged as mountain peaks. In blazing, poetic prose, Moustakis brings 1950s Alaska roaring to life.”
—Kawai Strong Washburn, author of Sharks in the Time of Saviors

“To read Homestead is to be swept into the Alaskan wilderness of an early marriage. Both intimate and epic, this novel questions the very meaning of origin and ownership. Moustakis writes with the hunger and heat of a pistol, the coolness of cherry wine and vanilla snow. A gorgeous feat of storytelling.”
—Rachel Swearingen, author of How to Walk on Water

“Moustakis’s evocation of place is breathtaking: reader, I doubt you will be able to finish this novel without falling in love with her Alaska, too. With Annie Proulx’s precision of detail and Ron Rash’s nuanced characterization, Moustakis’s debut marks a major literary achievement.”
—Nick White, author of How to Survive a Summer

“Part fever dream, part wilderness adventure, part family saga, in prose both elegant and resonant, Homestead tells of a broken, bitter man and an impulsive girl who battle it out to stake their claim, not on each other after all, but on 150 acres of unproven and break-your-heart-beautiful land in an Alaska on the verge of statehood.”
—Pam Houston, author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

“With haunting clarity and lyrical grace, Moustakis harnesses the power, the seductive beauty, and the divine treachery of the natural world to tell an epic story of survival and restless longing. Moustakis is a writer whose crystalline prose dazzles on every page. Homestead is an absolute triumph!”
—Amber Dermont, New York Times bestselling author of The Starboard Sea

“This book casts a spell. A quiet, immersive, and gorgeously written exploration of love, war, guilt, and forgiveness that asks how well one person can ever truly know another.”
—Ash Davidson, author of Damnation Spring

“Homestead ardently depicts a fraught and complicated moment in history through the most intimate of lenses: that of a young marriage built on uncertain ground. Moustakis has given us—in sentences as beautiful and brutal as the landscapes they describe—a haunting portrait of the terrain of the heart.”
—Jennine Capó Crucet, author of Make Your Home Among Strangers