In 1926, during Prohibition, Vital Bow is abducted at gunpoint during dinner at the family cottage in Rye Beach, Ohio. His intrepid fourteen-year-old daughter, Norah Bow, discovers her father’s involvement in a rum-running gang operating on Lake Erie and determines to sail north to rescue him. En route, Norah rescues Ruby Francoeur, an enigmatic woman of easy virtue who conceals secrets of her own. With Ruby as crew, Norah enters an island-and-city world of eccentric and monstrous characters who test her resolve, strength, and knowledge as both a young woman and a skipper. The Last Tale of Norah Bow is a coming-of-age story told by an elder Norah, a tale filled with characters steeped in betrayal, remorse, and a fierce desire for more lives. The Last Tale of Norah Bow is a story about family secrets, self-reliance, and the complicated nature of memory itself.

Praise for The Last Tale of Norah Bow

"The Last Tale of Norah Bow is a thrilling story—a roller-coaster ride with unforgettable characters and suspenseful life-and-death moments on the wild waves of Lake Erie. Like brave Norah herself, it is full of heart. I loved every page of it."

—Mary Logue, author of The Streel

"Like Homer’s Odyssey, The Last Tale of Norah Bow is a voyage—ultimately, a voyage home. Through storms and calm, night sailing a great lake in a small boat, Norah is on a quest for answers to dangerous questions. There’s a wonderfully vivid sense of place in this book: Lake Erie, its islands and inlets and its treacherous weather, the seedy dockyards of Prohibition-era Detroit, its whiskey river roaring with deadly opportunity. The Last Tale of Norah Bow is unfailingly eventful (buildings are destroyed, weapons wound and kill, death by drowning threatens more than once), but the story’s real drama lies in Norah’s heart, torn with suspicion, driven by love."

—Lon Otto, author of A Man in Trouble

"Capturing the reader instantly, Norah's vibrant, precocious voice carries us into the world, and the historical moment, of The Last Tale of Norah Bow, where the tender, heartbreaking, and utterly believable story unfolds on the whiskey river of Detroit....the language of the book makes it infinitely more than the sum of its parts. White's lyrical mastery and exacting eye for what Nabakov called 'the divine detail' are evident not just in the glorious sentence-level prose but in their creation of a world and a story that envelops the reader from the first page to the last."

—Marya Hornbacher, author of Wasted, The Center of Winter, and Madness