There was a lot I enjoyed about this book, from the Native American mythology to the deep and definite tenderness between Sophie and Allen, but in places I found it untidy, and vague where clarity was needed. However, I think it doesn’t quite live up to its predecessor. There is a lot of flitting, and I felt the writing never lingered long enough on secondary characters to solicit much empathy for them, but overall Bright Edge has cohesion, and winds down to a satisfying conclusion. ‘They hold that some can walk back & forth over that line, here a man, there a beast… The otter pelt on her shoulders, that there is the skin of her husband… She says the Wolverine River is no place for men like us.’įor a book that is really quite all over the place, it ties together surprisingly well. There is also a tertiary thread, more superficial, which is a string of correspondence between one of their elderly descendants and an Alaskan museum curator, together with a scattering of pseudo-historic documents. Allen Forrester and his expedition team into the reaches of Alaska, whilst Sophie, his pregnant wife, navigates life at the barracks in Vancouver, exploring her love of wild birds through the blossoming art of photography. Ivey has a way with words that I’ve seldom seen bettered, and although this layered stack of letters and diaries is a different type of book to The Snow Child, it shares the same vivid evocation of the natural world. To the Bright Edge of the World is a sumptuous feast of language.

Ivey’s debut, The Snow Child, is one of my all time favourites, so I have long avoided her only other full-length work in order to really savour it. This lavish epistolary novel has been on my TBR list for some time.

To the bright edge of the world review