Now in paperback, Jim Harrison’s Returning to Earth has been universally praised, and is one of his most popular recent books. In Returning to Earth, Harrison has delivered a masterpiece—a tender, profound, and magnificent novel about life, death, and how it is sometimes possible to find redemption in unlikely places.Donald is a middle-aged Chippewa-Finnish man, married to a white woman who renounced the wealth she was raised with, and father to two grown children. As Returning to Earth opens he is slowly dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease. His condition deteriorating, he realizes no one alive will be able to pass on to his children their family history once he is gone. He begins dictating to his wife, Cynthia, stories he has never shared with anyone—as around him, his family struggles with how to lay him to rest with the same dignity with which he has always lived.
