Tanana

Flemish city-dweller Matthias Declercq has been fascinated by the idea of the wilderness ever since he was a child. What would it be like to live far away from everything, in the heart of nature? He decides to follow in the footsteps of a fellow villager who emigrated to Alaska in the 1960s and ends up in Tanana, a tiny village on the River Yukon, inhabited by only a few hundred people.

There, at the end of the world, he encounters the most remarkable characters. The indigenous people, the Athabaskans, live alongside war veterans, elderly hippies and self-proclaimed scientists. It is a microcosm teeming with free spirits, adventurers and hermits, but also alcoholics and crooks, all of whom delight in the breathtaking landscape and the ever-stunning Yukon river.

Declercq experiences all four seasons in the North and is amazed by the endurance, the destructive impulses and the enormous resilience of human beings in this extreme, rapidly changing world. His account is empathetic, stylistically clear and compelling. Matthias Declercq, author of the reissued The Fall and the bestseller The Mystery of Urk, is the perfect narrator for this book about life in the wilderness.