I just finished reading the late Alaska author Marjorie Kowalski Cole‘s award-winning novel Correcting the Landscape for the second time. And I’m still impressed by the quietness of this book, and how it lulls you in, how it wraps around you in the simplest and yet most secure of ways.

[image error]

The book, which won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction (judged by Barbara Kingsolver), takes place in Fairbanks, Alaska, and the winter landscape comes through so clearly that I often had to stop reading to make...