Peter Rock Book order

A father and his estranged daughter reconnect to try to understand a decades-old trauma in this haunting novel, part ghost story, part lyrical exploration of family, aging, and how we remember the past. At age eleven, Helen disappeared in the wilderness of Mount Rainier National Park while camping with her father, Benjamin. She was gone for almost a week before being discovered and returned to her family. It is now twenty-five years later, and after more than two decades of estrangement, Helen and Benjamin reconnect at his home in Portland, Oregon, to try to understand what happened during the days she was gone. Meanwhile, Benjamin meets an odd pair, a woman and boy who seem driven to help him learn more about Helen's disappearance and send him on a journey that will lead to a murder house, uncanny possession, and a bone-filled body of water known as Sad Clown Lake, a lake that could only be found by getting lost, that was never in the same place twice. Passersthrough is a haunted, starkly lyrical exploration of family, memory, and the border between life and death.

“Swimming at night, to compare its slipperiness to that of a dream would be to ignore the work of staying afloat, the mesmerism brought on by the rhythm, the repetition of the strokes.” Beneath the surface of Lake Michigan there are vast systems: crosscutting currents, sudden drop-offs, depths of absolute darkness, shipwrecked bodies, hidden places. Peter Rock’s stunning autobiographical novel begins in the ’90s on the Door Peninsula of Wisconsin. The narrator, a recent college graduate, and a young widow, Mrs. Abel, swim together at night, making their way across miles of open water, navigating the currents and swells and carried by the rise and fall of the lake. The nature of these night swims, and of his relationship to Mrs. Abel, becomes increasingly mysterious to the narrator as the summer passes, until the night that Mrs. Abel disappears. Twenty years later, the narrator—now married with two daughters—tries to understand those months, his forgotten obsessions and dreams. Digging into old notebooks and letters, as well as clippings he’s preserved on the “psychic photography” of Ted Serios and scribbled quotations from Rilke and Chekhov, the narrator rebuilds a world he’s lost. He also looks for clues to the fate of Mrs. Abel, and begins once again to swim distances in dark water.

Ein dreizehnjähriges Mädchen lebt mit seinem Vater in einem riesigen Naturschutzgebiet im Westen der USA. Caroline kennt alle Geheimnisse des Waldes, vor allem aber weiß sie, wie man sich in der Wildnis verbirgt. Denn niemand darf ihr und ihrem Vater auf die Spur kommen. Erst als ein Jogger ihre Behausung entdeckt, verändert sich ihr Leben: Sie ergreifen die Flucht. In einer Welt, die nicht die ihre ist, muss sich Caroline neu bewähren. Und schon bald geht es für sie um Leben oder Tod. Die Ereignisse, die Peter Rock seine einzigartige Heldin mit ihrer erstaunlich aufrichtigen und warmen Stimme schildern lässt, beruhen auf einer wahren Begebenheit. ›Meine Wildnis‹ erzählt von Überleben und Hoffnung und entführt uns an die Ränder der Gesellschaft.