Returning to earth / Jim Harrison

"In Returning to Earth, Harrison has delivered a novel about life, death, and finding redemption in sometimes unlikely places." "Donald is a middle-aged Chippewa-Finnish man, married to a white woman who renounced the wealth she was raised with, and father to two grown children." "He is dying of Lou Gehrig's disease and realizes no one alive will be able to pass on to his children their family history once he is gone. He begins dictating to his wife, Cynthia, stories he has never shared with anyone - about how three generations ago his family settled in Michigan at the height of the logging industry; about his own relationship to his unique spiritual heritage. Meanwhile, around him, his family struggles with how to lay him to rest with the same dignity with which he always lived." "Over the course of the year following Donald's death, his loved ones struggle to make sense of their loss. His daughter begins studying Chippewa ideas of death for clues on her father's religion, and her mother, Cynthia, is at loose ends for how to protect or guide her. Bereft of the family she created to escape the malevolent influence of her own father, Cynthia and her eccentric brother, David, find, all these years later, that redeeming the past is not a lost cause." "Jim Harrison writes about the heart of this country like no other writer - about the culture of Native America, the natural world and our place in it, the loss that has shaped our history, and the pleasures that raise life to the sublime."--BOOK JACKET.