Leif Enger

When Midwestern movie house owner Virgil Wander's car flies off the road into icy Lake Superior he survives, but his language and memory are altered and he emerges into a world no longer familiar to him. Virgil begins to piece together his personal history and the lore of his broken town, with the help of a cast of affable and curious locals. Into this community returns a prodigal son, Adam Leer, who may hold the key to reviving their town. -- adapted from jacket.

Virgil Wander

Shona Tiger

Absolutely lovely. I loved Peace Like a River, and I love this one, in a different way.

Rick Dobrowolski

Virgil Wander is a beautifully written story. Leif has a mastery of the English language and story-telling that shows itself throughout the book. 

Virgil is the central character who has had an accident that has changed his personality ever so slightly and left him with less words at his disposal at first, but thankfully these words keep coming back to him as he describes the events of a small town along Lake Superior.

Overall, this was a delightful read.

Allie Herrington

Librarian: As a librarian I feel like this is going to be one of those books that all of those of us who are professional readers love, and that we have an insane amount of difficulty convincing the rest of the world to even pick up. I mean, it's a gorgeous book. Beautiful prose, an interesting, if meandering plot, deep amounts of thought and symbolism. There problem is it seems to lack mass market appeal which might make it difficult to convince people to read. It's just too eclectic.
Reader: As I already mentioned, this is a beautiful book. Despite only having marginal interest in it going in, I found myself swept up in the story from nearly the first line. I did find it a little slow at times. The plot meanders a bit, spending time on details that can tend toward the trivial. But then, life os like that. And above all else, this is a book about life. The good, and the bad of it. It's a theme that speaks to the heart of who we are, and I enjoyed this wander through it.

Elizabeth Moore

This book is an absolutely sparkling treasure and I love it! I mark up books with little glittery tabs of washi tape when I come across lines and passages and images I don’t want to forget, and I think I just about ran through a 60-foot roll of tape to keep up with this 300 page story. 

On the surface, Virgil Wander is about a small, failing town and the small, quirky lives of its inhabitants, namely the titular character who has just come back from the edge of the dead after an unfortunate accident involving plowing through a cliff guardrail and nosediving into sub-freezing Lake Superior. 

Under the covers, the book is about big losses salved through little redemptions, the underestimated power of community, and figuring out that meaning in life isn’t in fact, always farther “out there” - usually it just explodes out of the tiny details right in front of your nose. 

Below the mattress, the book gets in Jungian, Joseph Campbell-type storytelling and presents even everyday, small-town life as a struggle between good and evil, life and death, heroes’ journeys, and hard-fought legacies that bore themselves into small-town mythology and universal legend. And then just snowed all over the whole damn book like a Minnesota blizzard is beautiful, beautiful writing.

Quirky, charming, extraordinarily and surprisingly full of depth, and I cannot get over how boldly (and successfully) the author pulled off so many interesting literary twists and turns. The irony of a narrator who is in love with adjectives but who, due his gnarly head injury, can’t actually verbalize any good ones for most of the story. Magical realism (think devil fish, deathly specters, raining frogs, and plague-level wildlife invasions) unapologetically set in the most seemingly un-magical of all settings, a down-and-out used-to-be-a-mining-town on the grey bluffs of northern Minnesota. Anthropomorphic kites. A fate-shifting visitor from the arctic circle. A doom-harbinger incarnate who foreshadows every evil tragedy in the story but leaves no prints. 

It’s not every day that you get to read a book so hard-rooted in everyday, small-town reality that feels nothing short of otherworldly.

I loved this book. It felt like a warm hug that makes you cry and sing and want to jump in a freezing Great Lake for no apparent reason. Read it.

Barry Hess

Molly Brown

The first novel in ten years from award-winning, million-copy bestselling author Leif Enger, Virgil Wander is an enchanting and timeless all-American story that follows the inhabitants of a Midwestern town in their quest to revive its flagging heart

Virgil Wander

Reviews