Listen to the First Chapter:
From the Book Jacket:
In an isolated cabin in an Arctic wilderness, 14-year-old Sig is alone with a corpse: his father, who has fallen through the ice on the lake outside and frozen to death only hours earlier. Then, out of the Arctic darkness, comes a stranger: a terrifying giant of a man claiming that Sig's father owes him a share of a horde of stolen gold -- and threatening awful violence if Sig doesn't reveal the gold's whereabouts. Sig knows nothing about the gold, but he does know that there's a loaded Colt revolver hidden in the cabin's storeroom -- a gun that his father had said would protect him, but which his mother had abhorred. REVOLVER alternates between the lonely cabin and events during the Alaska Gold Rush ten years earlier, gradually unspooling the mystery of the stolen gold and the terrifying stranger, and building to a climax that turns on whether and why Sign will use the hidden gun. REVOLVER is a compelling frontier survival story, crafted with the intensity and precision of a one-act-play.
Reviews:
Set in 1910, 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle in the Scandinavian town of Giron, this intense survival story is propelled by a relentless sense of danger and bone-chilling cold. Einar, teenage Sig's father, has died after a fall through the ice. But the harsh environment pales in comparison with the ruthless stranger, Gunther Wolff, who demands from Sig and his sister the gold their father allegedly stole from him a decade earlier in the Alaska Gold Rush. Sedgwick (My Swordhand Is Singing ) reveals the truth in riveting, gemlike scenes that juggle time periods, points of view, and the family's divided worldview, epitomized by Einar's Colt revolver. “Guns are evil. Evil, Einar,” says Sig's pacifist mother, while the more pragmatic Einar believes his Colt is “the most beautiful thing in the world.” In the end, the gun plays a pivotal role as Sig must shape his own view and act accordingly. Gracefully weaving in sources as diverse as the Old Testament story of Job and an 1896 ad for the revolver, Sedgwick lures his readers into deeper thinking while they savor this thrillingly told tale. -- Publishers Weekly
“Even the dead tell stories,” begins Sedgwick’s slim yet taut and complex thriller about a family barely surviving in 1910 along the Swedish-Finnish border, 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Sig pieces together the story his father, Einar Andersson, is trying to tell after he discovers his frozen body on a slowly thawing lake, a risk his father would never take, and a one-thumbed, vengeful man named Gunther Wolff arrives, demanding the gold he claims he was cheated out of by Sig’s father. Alternating chapters between Sig and his older sister’s struggle with Wolff and their life ten years ago in the mining town of Nome, when their father was an assayist testing the purity of gold during a rush in the Alaska Territory, untangle Einar’s clues. Always looming in Sig’s past and present is his father’s Colt revolver and the moral dilemma: “To pull the trigger, or not to pull the trigger?” Is violence ever necessary? A chilling, atmospheric story that will haunt readers with its descriptions of a desolate terrain and Sig’s difficult decisions. -- Kirkus Reviews