I Cheerfully Refuse

By: Leif Enger

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Paperback | 8 July 2025

At a Glance

Paperback
336 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
19.8 x 13.0 x 2.7

Paperback

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Barnes & Noble's April Book Club Pick
An Amazon Top 10 Editors' Pick
A Most Anticipated Book of 2024 from Literary Hub

Set in a not-too-distant America, I Cheerfully Refuse is the tale of a bereaved musician taking to Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved bookselling wife. Encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, Rainy finds on land an increasingly desperate and illiterate people, a malignant billionaire ruling class, crumbled infrastructure and a lawless society. Amid the Gulliver-like challenges of life at sea, Rainy is lifted by physical beauty, surprising humour, generous strangers and an unexpected companion in a young girl who comes aboard. As his essentially guileless nature begins to make an inadvertent rebel of him, Rainy's private quest for the love of his life grows into something wider and wilder, sweeping up friends and foes alike in his strengthening wake.

A rollicking narrative in the most evocative of settings, I Cheerfully Refuse is a symphony against despair and a rallying cry for the future.

About the Author

Leif Enger grew up in Osakis, Minnesota, and worked as a reporter for Minnesota Public Radio before writing his bestselling debut novel Peace Like a River. His subsequent novels So Brave, Young and Handsome and Virgil Wander attracted numerous accolades. He lives with his wife in Duluth, Minnesota.

Industry Reviews

'A rare, remarkable book to be kept and reread - for its beauty of language, its gentle wisdom and its steady, unflagging hope' - Minneapolis Star Tribune

'Enger casts this adventure as an Orphean quest, but once Rainy takes on a young sidekick who's also on the lam, the enterprise feels like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn reconceived by Cormac McCarthy' -- Ron Charles - Washington Post

'As readable as anything [Enger] has written, [I Cheerfully Refuse] refreshingly concerns itself less with the miraculous than with what is right before our eyes, even when we want to look away' - Wall Street Journal

'An unusual and meaningful surprise awaits readers of Enger's latest...[his] retelling of Orpheus (who went to the underworld to rescue his wife) contains the authentic hope of a born optimist' - Los Angeles Times

'The transcendent latest from Enger (Peace Like a River) is at once a dystopian love story, a nautical adventure and a meditation on loss, kindness and natural beauty . . . This captivating narrative brims with hope' - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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