The Longest Winter
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
In 1911, a young John Shaw from South Carolina had his first taste of flying.
In 1926, two years after the plane crash death of his best friend, he attempted a solo flight record in a refitted 1923 Curtiss Jenny. Then, with half the journey completed, his plane was caught in a storm, went down, and for seventeen years he was listed as missing, presumed dead.
The Longest Winter is a work of fiction, the tale of one man’s life. His story is one of despair and courage, tragedy and triumph—stranded on an uncharted rocky island, his body broken by the crash, John is adopted into a tribe of Aleuts, until the evacuation of the Aleutian Islands in May 1943.
This is John’s story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Australian Harris's first novel is a compelling fictional biography of John Robert Shaw, a South Carolinian who crashed his plane on an uncharted island somewhere north of Anchorage in 1926 and spent 17 years living among the Eskimos who rescued him and nursed his broken body (he lost his left arm in the crash) back to a semblance of health. How much of the account is based on real events is unclear, but the tale that unfolds, mostly through Shaw's narration, is memorable. Even as the downed aviator adjusts to his new life with Kioki, the Eskimo woman he comes to love and to have children with, Shaw finds refuge from his stark, unforgiving surroundings in memories of his past life: of his lonely, widowed mother; of his sister Meg, an erstwhile ballerina struck down by polio; of Billy Taylor, the father figure who taught him to fly; of Bobby Sullivan, the best friend who died in his arms after a crash; of Sally, the woman with whom he shared a single night during his doomed flight but whom he can never forget. This moving novel is about courage and growth and survival, about how Shaw comes to love the barren world in which he at first feels trapped and abandoned. Concluding with two dramatic homecomings, it makes an unforgettable story.
Customer Reviews
Very enjoyable read!
Credible and detailed life story that reads like a biography. It isn’t!
I noted some saying that it was a little slow in the middle. Although I didn’t find it so, this reflects the ‘longest winter’ that the main character experiences, so may be a device that serves to reinforce this.