Description
Brian Thomas Isaac was born in 1950 on the Okanagan Indian Reserve, near Vernon, British Columbia. After completing grade eight, he found work in the Alberta oil fields and in construction, eventually retiring as a bricklayer. He came to writing late in life. In 2022, his bestselling debut, All the Quiet Places, won an Indigenous Voices Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and CBC’s Canada Reads. He lives with his wife in West Kelowna, BC.
From the award-winning, bestselling author of All the Quiet Places, comes Brian Thomas Isaac's highly anticipated, haunting and tender return to the Okanagan Indian Reserve and a teenager's complicated coming of age in a world of racism and hardship.
Summer, 1968. For the first time since his big brother, Eddie, disappeared two years earlier—either a runaway or dead by his own hand—sixteen-year-old Lewis Toma has shaken off some of his grief.
His mother, Grace, has gone south to the United States to pack fruit to earn the cash Grace needs to put proper plumbing into the three-room shack they share on the reserve, leaving Lewis to spend the summer with his aunt, uncle and cousins on their farm along the Salmon River. Their warm family life is so different from his own—almost enough to counter the pressures he feels growing up in a place where responsible adult men like his uncle are largely absent, broken by residential school and racism. Everywhere he looks, women carry the load, sometimes with kindness, but often with the bitterness, anger and ferocity of his own mother, who kicked Lewis’s lowlife father, Jimmy, to the curb long ago.
Lewis has vowed never to be like his father—but a sexual encounter with a predatory older woman tests his resolve. Worse, his dad is back in town and scheming on how to use the Indian Act to steal Grace's land. And then, at summer's end, shocking revelations shake the family, unleashing a deadly force of anger and frustration.
With so many traps laid for him, can Lewis find a path to a different future?