Winner of the North Street Book Prize for Literary Fiction

In Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where logging and mining shape a rugged and unforgiving world, twelve-year-old Leif struggles to live up to his father's ideal of manhood-until a peculiar chainsaw accident forces him to confront a painful truth.

With vivid, atmospheric prose and a haunting sense of place reminiscent of Jack London's survival story "To Build a Fire" or Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, The Faller explores grief, the fragility of connection, and the resilience needed to break free from one's past.

"Michael Demaray's novella The Faller is a stark but redemptive coming-of-age story....When he loses his parents within the space of a year, ...12-year-old Leif must discover how a man loves and grieves without destroying himself."
-Winning Writers