North Country by Matt Bondurant released from Blackstone Publishing in November 2025. The literary thriller opens with “Two children of the North Country, up before dawn,” a sort of preamble detailing a traumatic moment in the main character’s childhood: Their spoons clinked in unison as they ate cereal in the kitchen. Upstairs, their parents and…
OPENINGS by Rae Cline
North Country by Matt Bondurant released from Blackstone Publishing in November 2025. The literary thriller opens with “Two children of the North Country, up before dawn,” a sort of preamble detailing a traumatic moment in the main character’s childhood:
Their spoons clinked in unison as they ate cereal in the kitchen. Upstairs, their parents and older brother are swaddled in heavy blankets, the windows black and rimmed with frost. In the mudroom, Kaiser gathered jackets, pants, gloves, and hats, whispered instructions, worked buttons and zippers, tied laces. His little sister, weak with sleep, slumped against the wall in her down parka….
Kaiser and his sister pull their sled onto a frozen Lake Champlain where a mysterious shadow lurks beneath, ultimately cracking open the ice below them. The children fall into the freezing water and herein is where the mystery deepens. I don’t want to give too much detail about the opening, here, as the opening has its own reveal that does its work well. When we meet Kaiser again, we meet him as the man and veteran haunted by war and the mystery of his sister and the shadow beneath the ice.
Bondurant’s narrative creates a delicious tension expected from a thriller, yes, but this is no ordinary thriller. Bondurant’s storytelling has the immersive detailing evident of his literary craft. The prose is captivating. The details are as entrancing as they are darkly familiar, brooding like the shadow that took Kaiser’s sister.
I am a big fan of Bondurant’s The Wettest County in the World and the film adaptation. He also co-founded a fantastic literary conference in Seaside on the Gulf of Mexico, the Longleaf Writer’s Conference, which is also highly recommended. In all truth, I wasn’t sure what to think of Bondurant on thriller. Thrillers are not my usual reading choice, though I am partial to dark films. I thought, let’s give it a go. And I find myself completely enthralled. This book shows an adept versatility in craft that makes me wonder what other literary tricks Bondurant might be hiding in his pen.
North Country is highly recommended.
About Matt Bondurant
Matt Bondurant’s latest novel North Country published November 11, 2025. His previous novels include Oleander City, a historical novel about the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 and the boxer Jack Johnson, published in June of 2022. Other novels: The Night Swimmer, which was featured in the New York Times Book Review, Outside Magazine, and The Daily Beast, among others. His second novel The Wettest County in the World is an international bestseller, a New York Times Editor’s Pick, a San Francisco Chronicle Best 50 Books of the Year, and was made into a feature film (Lawless) by Director John Hillcoat, starring Shia Labeouf, Tom Hardy, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska, Gary Oldman, and Guy Pearce. His first novel The Third Translation is an international bestseller, translated into 14 languages worldwide. He has published short stories in such journals as Glimmer Train, The New England Review, and Prairie Schooner, and his latest short story appears in the Dallas Noir anthology published in 2015. Matt has published poems in The Notre Dame Review and Ninth Letter, among others, and his poetry is featured in Imaginative Writing, the most widely adopted creative writing text in the world. Read more at mattbondurant.com.
About Blackstone Publishing
Today, Blackstone has firmly positioned itself as one of America’s fastest-growing and respected publishing houses with multiple New York Times bestsellers, Grammy Award–winning audio productions, and books placed on the New York Times Best Books of the Year list. A truly independent, privately owned publisher, with offices on both coasts, Blackstone is home to a vibrant and eclectic community of storytellers and story lovers, adding hundreds of new titles each month to its catalog of tens of thousands of books. Read more at blackstonepublishing.com.
About Openings
Openings is a weekly recommendations column by Rae Cline, published at Eckleburg. Openings features literary musings, culture and book recommendations, focusing on beautiful books with memorable openings, where readers meet intriguing characters, settings and moments in which the mind can explore what is, what might be and how this opens the reader’s imagination. Read more on Instagram @raeclineauthor and at the new raecline.substack, where you can submit recent titles of adult literary fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry for consideration.
