"[Harrison's] books glisten with love of the world, and are as grounded as Thoreau's in the particulars of American place--its rivers and thickets, its highways and taverns. Bawdily and with unrelenting gusto, Harrison's 40 years of writing explores what constitutes a good life, both aesthetically and morally, on this planet. . . . Quietly magnificent . . . A luminous, sad calm pervades this novel. . . . [An] extraordinary valediction to mourning. It sharpens one's appetite for life even at its darkest." --Will Blythe, The New York Times Book Review

"Time, memory, and the land all play key roles in Harrison's remarkable new novel. . . . A deeply felt meditation on life and death, nature and God, this is one of Harrison's finest works."--Library Journal (starred review)

"Jim Harrison is a writer with a bear in him. Fearless, a top predator, omnivorous, he consumes all manner of literature and history and philosophy while walking the North Woods, fishing in streams or driving the back roads of North America ... He is one of the great writers of our age for the muscularity of his prose; his strong, declarative sentences boom one after the other like waves pounding a Lake Superior shore, each carrying some new flotsam from the conscious or unconscious worlds." --Jim Lenfestey, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"Wrenchingly sad ..." --Charles McGrath, The New York Times

"[Harrison] offers ... roomy definition of integrity endlessly open to interpretation and based on relationships with the earth, with one's family, with oneself. Locating ourselves in the four directions, in the march of ancestors, in the web of species, Harrison means to tell us, might help us feel safer, which would make us kinder and less destructive.... Although these characters share a common heritage and interests, they remain so distinct, so memorable, that you would recognize their voices in a crowded bar, even if you had your back to them. As for the places they love and inhabit, the chokecherry and dogwood and porcupine-quill baskets and feathers and stones - well, let's just say that all five senses were used to re-create them." --Susan Salter Reynolds, The Los Angeles Times

"Beautifully written..." --Ashley Simpson Shires, Rocky Mountain News

"Beautiful, complex and ... heart-wrenching.... Really... really, Harrison is one of the most remarkable writers on the planet. He is one of the few who can write a book about death and dying that is at once dignified, uplifting and hilarious, without a trace of mawkishness or sentimentality.... On every page of a Harrison novel are revelatory gems of seemingly off-handed wisdom.... It is useless to catalog the wisdom on every page of 'Returning to Earth, ' except to say that like great poetry, Harrison's prose has the power to stop the eye and the mind at the same time, to suspend a reader in an absolute moment of contemplation, and to tear away the junk of the world, revealing only what our deepest nature desires, peace and contentment.... Redemption and courage flow from Harrison's heart to ours. We're lucky to have him. He's a genuine treasure, an American writer who deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature." --Gaylord Dold, The Wichita Eagle

"For more than four decades his sinewy prose and poetry have been exhorting us - without timidity - to embrace life in all its sensuality. Now, with his splendid new novel, [Harrison] delivers a treatise on love, loss, and longing, and reminds us that such embarrassment can compromise our lives while we yet live.... This should not be mistaken as an endorsement of 'closure' that false sedative to which we, in our