NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH
A Journey Into the Interior of Alaska

NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH
Literature & Essay / Travel
6 x 9, 304 pp
Paper, $15.95
1-56279-122-2
US and Canada

An epic account of a woman’s experiences
among native people in the interior of Alaska.

“The reader of this book takes up an account of a long journey, a physical and metaphysical journey, into a country of Imagination. That country is Alaska.”

So begins Narrow Road to the Deep North, the extraordinary story of a young woman’s experiences among Athabaskan Indians in the interior of Alaska. A poet recently returned from the literary salons of Paris, the author takes a job teaching in a remote region of Alaska. As she comes to know the region and its peoples—as she learns to see the visible and invisible world around her—she finds herself more and more the student rather than the teacher.

A true story on an epic scale, told with a relentless realism that portrays Alaska and its people without romanticizing them, charged with a unique and informed intelligence, Narrow Road to the Deep North is the moving story of a woman’s path to knowledge in a remote and austere land.

“A finely wrought, layered story ... rich with affectionate, precise profiles of native people and white outsiders.... Whether writing about intimate relationships, poetry, or the intricacies of village life, her approach is full of grace and equanimity.”
— Publishers Weekly

“McNamara ... is still a poet, and her chronicle remains intensely vivid and insightful. It is perhaps one of the most informative and accurate stories ever written about the spiritual culture of Alaska.”
— Rain Taxi

“Possessed of a keen eye for visual and aural detail, McNamara tells her story with poetic and almost oblique subtlety…. In her elegant prose she carefully tries to navigate the straits between falling for the fascination of life in the Alaskan outback and succumbing entirely to the tug of that romance.”
— Washington Post Book Review

“The author displays an impressive ability to blend the anthropological with the poetic, combining reportage with mystery, travel narrative with past, present, and forever.... The language used combines the heights of the heart with the facts of the matter, never blinking, as the author explores the relationships between Natives and whites, women and men, spirit and money, in a land that demands endurance from its residents.... The best introduction to Alaska a reader could want.”
— Bloomsbury Review

“[There is] a deep, rolling movement of feeling underneath the story, conveying the communal world, the natural world, the holy world.”
— Fay Myenne Ng, author of Bone

“Katherine McNamara has such a vivid vision of the interior world that the real world falls away into the background. That’s what’s so refreshing about her outlook. And so desperately needed in our almost entirely materialistic society. Light in a cave, air in a closet.”
— Benjamin Cheever

“This is the closest any Wasichu of our time will come to understanding the religion of Native nations, and nobody will ever get closer, because the animism enlivening that culture, which had barely made it into the sixties, is now nearly gone.”
— Larry Woiwode