Kirjahaku

Before River, everything was perfect. . . .Growing up on a Canadian dairy farm less than two miles from the American border, fifteen-year-old Natalie Ward knows little of the outside world. But her loving, close-knit family is the envy of young and old alike in the nearby town of Atwood. Natalie adores her three brothers--especially Boyer, the eldest, whom she idolizes. But everything changes one hot July afternoon in 1966 when a long-haired stranger appears at their door--a soft-spoken American, a Vietnam War resister, who will test the family's morals and beliefs, and set in motion catastrophic events that will shatter Natalie's relationships with those she most dearly loves.

Howard Coulter was one of hundreds of Canadian soldiers sent to the Far East following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. Surviving the fierce battle for Hong Kong, he became a POW, and is haunted by the memories that he carries with him. His daughter Ethie was born after he returned from the war. She never knew him as he was before, an open, loving man and a devoted husband. Why, Ethie wonders, is he so silent and withdrawn? Howard carries more than the physical and mental scars inflicted by his captors. Something happened in Hong Kong, a secret that he has carried for two decades and one which threatens to destroy his family should it ever come to light.

Following tragic events from which Juliee O'Dale believes she will never recover, she buys into her husband Ian's dream to give up their comfortable city lives and retreat to the isolated Chilcotin area of British Columbia. Only after purchasing the remote six hundred acre cattle ranch do they realize that, along with the and, they have inherited the reclusive tenant who occupies and old trapper's cabin on the property. As both Juliee and Ian wrestle with their individual guilt over their deteriorating marriage and their sorrow, they also have to contend with the wilderness at their doorstep and the mysterious tenant, Virgil Blue. Another riveting novel from the author of THE PROMISE OF RAIN, a Globe and Mail Top 100 title in 2009.

Growing up in the 1930s, Adeline Beale knows little of the outside world or the looming shadows of a second world war. Addie-as her grandfather Chauncey Beynon Beale affectionately calls her- believes that everything she could ever want or need is to be found on his cattle ranch, the place her family calls home, or in the little town twelve bush miles away, a place called Sorry. After tragedy strikes her family, Addie holds her sorrows close to her heart. Only later will she learn that her grandfather too has lived with his own secret torment for more than seventy years. It will take his slipping into blindness and dementia before the dark spectre from his past emerges, leaving her the one responsible for its consequences. And when that day arrives, when Chauncey Beale's past intersects with Addie's present, it will change her future in ways that she, and those she loves, could never have imagined.