There is an accumulating power in this book, and a reader emerges worn, weary but satisfied. They must also, of course, survive one another. This means they must build a house, farm at least 20 acres and survive the weather (and the bears). They marry almost immediately and set out to prove their claim to the satisfaction of the territorial authorities.

Marie, a Texan visiting her sister in Anchorage in 1956, meets Lawrence, who has laid a claim on 150 acres near Anchorage. Happily, Fairbanks native Melinda Moustakis has carved her way through this thicket of difficulty and arrived at a nicely cleared, rather compact and very emphatic novel, “Homestead.” It imagines the grueling experience of, it appears, her grandparents in something like frontier-era Alaska. And she must manage to preserve a sense of mystery and discovery in a universe in which she knows the future and her characters do not. She must depict the specific ways in which that unfamiliar time and place impinges upon and deforms the people in it. She must convincingly build an environment alien to herself.

What about a novelist setting a story in a time not her own? She faces a set of additional challenges.

In this way, one’s work will remain of interest even to future people who may not know how to, say, sail a sloop, harness a carriage or spear an adversary on the Plains of Troy. What a writer hopes for, then, is to get down not only the ephemeral truths of one’s own time but something that does not really change: human nature, which might be described as the way people work generally against the obstacles of fortune, no matter what specific form these obstacles happen to take in one’s own era. And because the world we know is always changing, any reality a writer manages to capture between covers will, before too long, begin to look a little weird. Every novel, after all, constructs or represents a world in which its characters move and struggle, and through which its thematic materials are rendered. Seen a certain way, every novel is destined to become a historical novel.

Into the wilderness series in order