The Mailbag No Plane Brought

About this book

Seventeen-year-old Sigrid "Sig" Holm was born on Tavraq, a gravel-spit hamlet of eighty-nine people in the Canadian Arctic, and she means to leave it. One season running the one-room post office while her father recovers from his stroke—then boarding school in Yellowknife, working plumbing, a life that is not whiteout. Then, stamping last week's mail, she finds a letter in her mother's hand, postmarked yesterday. Her mother died when Sig was twelve. Soon other letters arrive that no plane brought: a recipe, an apology, a map—words from people lost in old storms, reaching the living at last. And the letters begin asking their readers to walk north of the last cairn, a place on no chart. Forty days remain before the airstrip closes and Tavraq must relocate south.