The Trouble Up North

An NPR Best Book of the Year 2025

An atmospheric, haunting novel about the Sawbrooks, a family of bootleggers with a troubled history and a deep connection to the Michigan land that binds them.

The Sawbrooks have spent decades crisscrossing the waterways and vast forests between Northern Michigan and Canada to make their way as smugglers. Those hidden routes through the border's nooks and crannies are their legacy, but they no longer pay the bills. The world has changed; the resorts, with their fancy clientele, are infringing on their space, and the Sawbrooks find themselves deeply fractured, clutching at their past and the last vestiges of a once close family.

Rhoda, the tough-as-nails matriarch, is caring for her dying husband while finding herself disappointed in her three adult grandchildren. The eldest daughter, Lucy, is now a park ranger, working to federally protect the land against her mother’s will, while Buckner, the only boy, is drinking his life away. Jewell, the baby of the family, is her mother’s last hope, but when she tries to save them all in one fell swoop she becomes ensnared in a crime of escalating proportions. The Sawbrooks will have to contend with the old familial ways and the new shifting world, and face each other—and their pain-filled past—to save one of their own.