PETER ROCK is the author of eleven previous works of fiction, including My Abandonment, which won the Alex Award and was adapted into the film Leave No Trace. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and John Dos Passos Prize, he lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and two daughters.
“Peter Rock is one of my favorite writers and I loved reading Makeshift, a gorgeously written, terrifying, and tender foray into the heart of what it means to be in relationship to one another, and to our world which is not over, which is still home.” —Karen Russell “In Peter Rock’s haunting and eerie eleventh novel, young Ari narrates a story of finding and making family after everything has gone wrong. Or have things gone wrong? Rock’s glorious evocation of the natural world yearns for a time before, or in this case, after modern civilization—here, wreck-diving cormorants and trees responding to the north-western breezes serve as a Greek chorus for a world slaked of human intervention. Lyrical and poignant, Makeshift proves a powerful antidote to the modern world by tracing the landscape’s roots to the Inuit peoples of the Pacific Northwest. This must-read novel lures the reader in, not unlike the coastal wrecks that line Makeshift Island.” —Adam Johnson author of The Wayfinder: A Novel