WILDFIRE SEASON, Andrew Pyper, Picador. $14.00
Several years ago I read this author’s first book, Lost Girls, and thought it a remarkable debut. I was not the only one: it won Canada’s prestigious Arthur Ellis Award. Like many Canadian authors, Pyper doesn’t get the respect he deserves this side of the border and so he slipped below my radar. That will never happen again! The story is this: near the small town of Ross River in the Yukon, an arsonist starts a fire in the wild. It will take some time for that fire to take hold, and, meanwhile, we meet the residents of that town: the firefighters led by Miles McEwan, burned and scarred from a forest fire, the hunters who use the town as a base to track grizzlies, their guides, and the native population. We also meet Alex who arrives in town with her daughter Rachel in tow. We follow these characters and we follow the fire. I was going to cut down on the superlatives because I thought I might raise expectations too high. But I can’t! I’m not going to say this is the best book I have ever read. But I will say that, as a reader, I live for the moment when a story like this comes into my hands. It is a privilege to read sentences that stop you in your tracks with their beauty even as they tell a universal truth. I don’t often quote other reviewers, but because he gets it so right, here is Ken Bruen: “...a novel of true haunting loneliness and isolation…a novel that blazes with all the ingredients of the best literature.” This was first published in Canada in 2005, then published in hardcover in the US.
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