Description
Michelle Porter is the descendent of a long line of Métis storytellers and a member of the Manitoba Métis Federation. Michelle Porter's debut novel, A Grandmother Begins the Story, won the 2024 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and was a finalist for the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Her previous books include the memoir Scratching River and Approaching Fire, a work of creative nonfiction about her great-grandfather, a fiddler from the Red River, which was shortlisted for the Indigenous Voices Award. Michelle lives in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, where she teaches creative writing and Métis Literature at Memorial University.
A young Métis man searching for his missing father finds himself arguing with a dying glacier in this compelling, profane, and ultimately hopeful novel about the burdens and blessings of inheritance, from the award-winning author of A Grandmother Begins the Story.
Robbie is torn: between trying to "rescue" his stubborn Métis mother—determined to stick with her abusive second husband and her home in the path of ravenous wildfires in Canada—and the quest to find his father, a white man often absent due to mental health challenges but now long missing in the mountains south of the border.
After he and his American uncle find themselves following a very pregnant bison up the slopes of a huge glacier named Omega, Robbie must also navigate between fear and wonder as he starts hearing the ancient voice of Omega giving him guidance. Has Robbie accessed a deep connection to the land, one he can trust? Or is he succumbing to the same illness that had wreaked havoc on his father's life?
Michelle Porter brings her distinctively musical, energetic, witty, sometimes bawdy style to a powerful contemporary story of identity and belonging, loss and healing, within families and with the immortal land itself.