Frontiers

The Alaska Highway provides the backdrop for Frontiers, the remarkable journey of a father and son struggling to find the missing pieces of themselves in a world that seems to hold no future. John, a grieving widower, is compelled by an unreasoning urge to seek accountability for his wife's accidental death. His father, Gordon, a recently retired minister, is expected to ease into retirement and accept sudden irrelevance. Though the two men have grown impossibly distant, their parallel crises forge the first common bond they have shared in more than twenty-five years. The drive to Alaska is supposed to offer them a chance to repair their fracture relationship. What begins promisingly enough, however, turns sour as the secret motivations of each are uncovered. John starts to wonder whether or not his father ever planned to return home alive. And with each passing mile an insidious pressure builds causing him to doubt his own sanity. Apparitions haunt him from a previous trip made fifteen years earlier when he had traveled down the same road with his fiancee. Joel Jensen's stunning debut novel resonates with echoes of Hamlet and Orpheus. Told with a deft sense of verisimilitude, Frontiers breaks new ground as an honest depiction of men's struggles; of fathers' and sons' expectations of each other, and their disappointments ? most often with themselves. While each man alone is unable to help himself, John and Gordon strive to find a way to save each other. Ultimately they transform Frontiers into a novel about courage and the willingness to demand answers to the kind of questions that are nearest to the heart, even out to and beyond the Last Frontier.Jensen, Joel is the author of 'Frontiers', published 2003 under ISBN 9780971561809 and ISBN 097156180X.