Peter Geye writes with an almost romantic passion about all things wintry. In "Northernmost," the finale in his Eide family trilogy with "The Lighthouse Road" and "Wintering," he takes snow to a religious precipice.

Half the story is again set in the fictitious town of Gunflint in northern Minnesota, in contemporary time; the other (and far more compelling) half is set in Hammerfest, Norway, in the late 1800s.

In Minnesota, Greta Nansen has decided her marriage to Frans, a Norwegian researcher, is over. That she never really loved him now seems obvious; that he's involved with a woman in Oslo should make the split easier, but he wants to reconcile with Greta. Her sanctuary is an old fish house in Gunflint where her great-great-great-grandfather, Odd Einar Eide, earned his living.

It is Odd Einar's story that reverberates with mystery and cold. In 1897, he and another seal hunter are marooned on an Arctic island. After a polar bear kills his companion, Odd Einar perseveres for two weeks in the bitter landscape, fighting starvation, and always awaiting the bear.

Once rescued, he returns home to Hammerfest — and his own funeral. His wife, Inger, is strangely shaken, even resentful at his return. But when a journalist seeks to write about Odd Einar's saga of survival, Inger seemingly warms to this venture, and to him. Here is a complicated and compelling couple.

Through Odd Einar, Geye imbues isolating bleakness with a perverse beauty. When the journalist prods Odd Einar about God in those moments, Geye makes an existential case for snow as a source of salvation.

Northernmost by Peter Geye

Odd Einar tries to explain "how I found new peace in that bleakness. It was as if I'd been pardoned from worry and guilt. … Had I put my faith in God, had I trusted in his guidance, I would've perished on Krossforden. Instead I trusted that my death would not matter. That I myself did not matter. And I did that by seeing the hereafter not as a time spent in heaven or hell, but as time I'd spend in the eternal snow."

The expansive transparency of Odd Einar's contemplations contrasts with Greta's insular angst. Aiming to confront Frans in Oslo, she impulsively continues on to Hammerfest. There, she meets Stig Hjalmarson, who plays organ at the church, piano at the cafe, and havoc with Greta's libido.

With his "lion's mane" of blond hair, eyes "dark and deeply set," and hands, well, "Oh my, those hands, they put a knot in her stomach." Stig makes Greta believe again in love. Here is a couple joined by a thunderbolt.

The contrasts continue. Is it a reflection of modernity that their lovemaking involves a frank recitation of body parts? Or maybe the more intuited scenes of Inger and Odd Einar's sexual life is what gives Stig and Greta's couplings a whiff of the softest porn.

Yet these two story lines need each other. Odd Einar's tale alone would be no more than a slim volume of folk heroism. Greta's struggle to recover her heart could seem prosaic, if not for the deft interweaving of her family history, bringing the threads of the first two books of the trilogy into a finished tapestry.

Geye captures winter so well in its physical and emotional consequences. That this can leave a reader with a bit of a chill in both body and soul is a considered risk.

Kim Ode is a former Star Tribune features writer.

Northernmost

By: Peter Geye.

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 352 pages, $27.

Event: Book launch via Zoom, in conversation with Curtis Sittenfeld, hosted by the Loft Literary Center, 7 p.m. Aug. 18, https://loft.org/events/northernmost-peter-geye-book-launch