The Last Crossing

Charles and Addington Gaunt must find their free- spirited brother, Simon, who has gone missing in the wilds of the American West. They enlist the services of a guide to lead them on their journey across a harsh and unknown landscape. This is the enigmatic Jerry Potts, half Blackfoot, half Scottish, who suffers his own painful past. They are joined by Lucy Stoveall, a woman filled with rage and sorrow over the loss of her young sister Madge who was brutally murdered. She is on a vengeful mission to track down and kill the murderous Kelso brothers. The group is joined by a jumble of other characters en route, each of whom are forced to confront their own demons. But at the novel's centre is a love story. Vanderhaeghe glides effortlessly through the patois and frontier talk, faultlessly switching from cultured English characters to American roughnecks to Scots-Canadians, and the natural prairie landscape is evoked brilliantly. Vanderhaeghe's new novel is an epic masterpiece that solidifies his place as one of Canada's best storytellers.

Literature & Fiction

Guy Vanderhaeghe

Contemporary

Little,Brown & Co

Charles and Addington Gaunt must find their free-spirited brother, Simon, who has gone missing in the wilds of the American West. They enlist the services of a guide to lead them on their journey across a harsh and unknown landscape. This is the enigmatic Jerry Potts, half Blackfoot, half Scottish, who suffers his own painful past. They are joined by Lucy Stoveall, a woman filled with rage and sorrow over the loss of her young sister Madge who was brutally murdered. She is on a vengeful mission to track down and kill the murderous Kelso brothers. The group is joined by a jumble of other characters en route, each of whom are forced to confront their own demons. But at the novel's centre is a love story. Vanderhaeghe glides effortlessly through the patois and frontier talk, faultlessly switching from cultured English characters to American roughnecks to Scots-Canadians, and the natural prairie landscape is evoked brilliantly.

ABACUS +

The first novel in nearly a decade from the three-time Governor General's Award‒winning author of The Last Crossing, August Into Winter is an epic story of crime and retribution, of war and its long shadow, and of the redemptive possibilities of love.\nYou carried the past into the future on your back, its knees and arms hugging you tighter with every step.\nIt is 1939, with the world on the brink of global war, when Constable Hotchkiss confronts the spoiled, narcissistic man-child Ernie Sickert about a rash of disturbing pranks in their small prairie town. Outraged and cornered, Ernie commits an act of unspeakable violence, setting in motion a course of events that will change forever the lives of all in his wake.\nWith Loretta Pipe--the scrappy twelve-year-old he idealizes as the love of his life--in tow, Ernie flees town. In close pursuit is Corporal Cooper, who enlists the aid of two brothers, veterans of World War One: Jack, a sensitive, spiritual man with a potential for brutal violence; and angry, impetuous Dill, still recovering from the premature death of his wife who, while on her deathbed, developed an inexplicable obsession with the then-teenaged Ernie Sickert.\nWhen a powerful storm floods the prairie roads, wreaking havoc, Ernie and Loretta take shelter in a one-room schoolhouse where they are discovered by the newly arrived teacher, Vidalia Taggart. Vidalia has her own haunted past, one that has driven her to this stark and isolated place with only the journals of her lover Dov, recently killed in the Spanish Civil War, for company. Dill, arriving at the schoolhouse on Ernie's trail, falls hard and fast for Vidalia--but questions whether he can compete with the impossible ideal of a dead man.\nGuy Vanderhaeghe, writing at the height of his celebrated powers, has crafted a tale of unrelenting suspense against a backdrop of great moral searching and depth. His is a canvas of lavish, indelible detail: of character, of landscape, of history--in all their searing beauty but all their ugliness, too. Vanderhaeghe does not shrink from the corruption, cruelty, and treachery that pervade the world. Yet even in his clear-eyed depiction of evil--a depiction that frequently and delightfully turns darkly comic--he will not deny the possibility of love, of light. With August Into Winter, Guy Vanderhaeghe has given us a masterfully told, masterfully timed story for our own troubled hearts.

AUGUST INTO WINTER: A NOVEL

MCCLELLAND STEWART

August Into Winter

The Englishman's Boy

Literary

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Books by Guy Vanderhaeghe