Title: True North
Description: The scion of a family of wealthy timber barons, David Burkett has grown up with a father who is a malevolent force, and a mother made vague and numb by alcohol and pills. He and his sister Cynthia, a firecracker who scandalizes the family at sixteen by taking up with the son of their Finnish-Native American gardener, are mostly left to make their own way. As David comes to adulthood, he realizes he must come to terms with his forefathers' rapacious destruction of the woods of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, as well as with the working people who made their wealth possible.
Subjects: Family-owned business enterprises, Fiction, Conflict of generations, Fathers and sons, Lumber trade
Places: Upper Peninsula (Mich.), Michigan, Upper Peninsula