Turn Again

<p><em>I was told you were a magic man.</em></p><p>In October of 1894 the anthropologist Rebecca Ashford arrives in Kodiak Alaska to interview a Russian prisoner with an American name and an Athabascan Indian past. Aleksandr Campbell has been sentenced to hang for a double murder killings that place in his homeland far to the north on the Kenai Peninsula-a little-known part of the territory where Russian is the common language and the handful of resident Americans are foreigners in a strange land. His tale recorded in her notes as he waits for the gallows spans years and miles of wilderness and clashing cultures. It is a story of young love and of old magic that is rapidly draining out of the country with the coming of the gold rush. It is a story of being Alaskan at a time when Alaska barely existed. </p>