ABOUT
THE BOOK

Admirers of Jack Hodgins’ previous work will be astonished by this break-through book. Complementing his usual high good humour, much of this powerful new novel is dark tragedy. Although it is set in 1922, the slaughter of the First World War lurks behind everything here, long before vivid flashbacks take us into the horror of the tranches. The book’s central setting is a “soldiers settlement” on Vancouver Island, where returned soldiers received land from a grateful nation. This meant that the men and their families ended up in tents staring at a landscape dominated by giant tree stumps, each of which had to be blasted out at graet risk to life and limb. Significantly,as they cleared their fields yard by yard, none of the men would allow barbed wire fences around them. The story of the settlement at Portuguese Creek is told in the voices of half a dozen of the inhabitants. among them we meet young Charlie MacIntosh, eleven, trying to recover from the sudden loss of his father; Johanna Seyerstead, the school teacher still waiting defiantly for her missing-in-action husband to ride into town; Wyatt Taylor, the Ontario man who crosses the country on horseback on a hopeless quest, only to be drawn into a romantic triangle that both amuses and fascinates his new neighbours. And above all there is Matt Pearson, the former teacher haunted by seeing one of his men – a keen young former student, a lover of poetry – shot in France as a deserter. Just as the war is a dark, brooding presence, so too is the forest fire up in the hills above the little community’s wooden homes, in a world of more than churning smoke. “There was heat and noise too, and wind, and flying sparks, and heavy burning limbs that tumbled through the air.” In Jack Hodgin’s skilful hands the horror of the forest fire intensifies the remembered horror of the First World War. The result is an extraordinarily powerful book, enriched by the author’s humanity, which leaves us feeling like a member of a dozen households, and part of an entire community.