Thank you to NetGalley and Blackstone Publishing for this ARC. This book was incredible. I could not put it down. I wish it was coming out sooner so I could talk to people about it. By the time I finished the first chapter I had already texted five people to tell them to add it to their TBR list.

Readers of Cormac McCarthy, Ron Rash, and (hear me out) Leigh Burdago's book Ninth House will love this book. The writing style felt like a McCarthy-Rash blend that I really enjoyed.

This book is set in North Chazy, New York. A town that is home to a college, a supermax prison, and a pet food plant. Our primary protagonist is Kaiser, a discharged JTAC who returns to North Chazy, his hometown, under unknown circumstances. Kaiser's return quickly loops him into the underbelly that runs the economics of the small town near the Canadian border, teasing out economics factors, town-gown dynamics, and how their interact with much larger forces. The book mixes science, local lore, and rumors about the people and places - all of which mix together into small town drama with a seedy undercurrent.

This was a book I didn't want to stop reading. The characters are excellent, the story is compelling, and the writing is on point.
Overall, I loved the book.

Absolutely stunning from start to finish. North Country is beautifully written, raw, atmospheric, and deeply human. Bondurant captures the rugged landscape and the people within it with such vivid, poetic detail that you can almost feel the cold air and grit in your teeth. The characters are layered and real, and the storytelling pulls you in completely.

It’s one of those rare books that lingers long after you finish, equal parts brutal and breathtaking. A powerful, unforgettable read.

Phenomenal read. Matt Bondurant (full disclosure - a wide swath of my family tree lies in Franklin County and includes Bondurants, so he's likely a third or fourth cousin) has taken the torch flung by Ron Rash, Lee Smith, and Charles Frazier, and carried it aloft into the literary stratosphere.
One quibbling bit: please do correct the French reference on p. 195 - "poisson" is "fish," and the correct quote is "Cher poison, préparé par les anges!" which is Baudelaire (Le Flacon, from Flowers of Evil).
There is a way to write gritty, human-centered prose without the grit and gore overtaking the message, so the reader feels the character's experience without the story becoming lost. It's a delicate balance that can elude even the most accomplished writers. Bondurant brings the reader directly into the tale without losing focus, without the distraction of overly descriptive passages that can derail a carefully constructed momentum. And yet, you feel the cold, slicing wind off the Lake and the enveloping, suffocating shock of frigid water, the subliminal thrill of anticipation, the yearning disturbance of complicated sexual desires; the dearth of hope in the miasma of poverty that strangles some of the neighborhoods near the local prison, and the livid disgust of some of the people who have to live there.
Each chapter limns the world of the small, cold border town of North Chazy from the perspective of one or more of its residents in a way that we know is leading toward something horrifying, and yet we live with each of these people in a way that feels real and authentic and causes the reader to lay bets on who will survive, and who will be indelibly changed by the experience - for good or ill. I especially appreciated the ability of the author to give his characters resilience in the form of empathy or knowledge where one doesn't expect it - as in Phil's self-discovery about his relationship with his baby daughter Juliet, as with the strongman Kaiser's almost obsessive affinity for science, with the sorority women's sisterhood that watches for other women in danger and their neatly orchestrated plan for lifting them gently out of it.
Honestly grateful for the opportunity to read this incredible story, thanks to Netgalley and the publisher in exchange for a review. Five-plus stars, and the hope that Matt Bondurant will keep writing, keep storytelling, keep traveling the route of the human mind and its history, and bring those things to light and life on the page.