About
the Book
From Karl Iagnemma, recipient of the Paris Review Plimpton Prize, comes a fierce and gorgeous story
of an estranged father and son’s unlikely journey though the wilderness of nineteenth-century America.
The year is 1844. Sixteen-year-old runaway Elisha Stone is in Detroit, a hardscrabble frontier town
on the edge of the civilized world. A canny survivor with the instincts of a born naturalist, Elisha
signs on to an expedition into Michigan’s vast, uncharted Upper Peninsula. The party is led by two
charismatic adventurers: Silas Brush, a ruthless, land-grabbing ex-soldier, and George Tiffin, a quixotic
professor desperate to discover proof of his unorthodox theories about the origins of man.
On the eve of the expedition’s departure, Elisha pens a heartfelt letter to his mother in Newell,
Massachusetts. But it is Elisha’s estranged father, the Reverend William Edward Stone, who opens
the envelope. Grief-stricken by the recent death of his wife—a death Elisha could not have known
about—Reverend Stone is jolted into action: he must find his son.
What follows is a powerful narrative about the complex love between fathers and sons and an evocative
portrait of an era of faith, wonder, and violence. A first novel of uncommon wisdom, The Expeditions is
confirmation of an extraordinary talent.
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