"First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then the murders, which happened later." When fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons' parents rob a bank, his sense of a happy, knowable life is forever shattered. In an instant, this private cataclysm drives his life across a threshold that can never be uncrossed.
His parents' arrest and imprisonment mean a threatening and uncertain future for Dell and his twin sister, Berner. Willful and burning with resentment, Berner flees their home in Montana, abandoning her brother and her life. But Dell is not completely alone. A family friend intervenes, spiriting him across the Canadian border, in hopes of delivering him to a better life. There, afloat on the prairie of Saskatchewan, Dell is taken in by Arthur Remlinger, an enigmatic and charismatic American, whose suave reserve masks a dark and violent nature.
Undone by the calamity of his parents' robbery and arrest, Dell struggles under the vast prairie sky to remake himself and define the adults he thought he knew and loved. But his search for grace and peace only moves him nearer a harrowing and murderous collision with Remlinger, an elemental force of darkness.
A true masterwork of haunting and spectacular vision from one of our greatest writers, Canada is a profound novel of boundaries traversed, innocence lost and reconciled, and the mysterious and consoling bonds of family. Told in spare elegant prose, resonant and luminous, it is destined to become a classic
420 pages (May 2012)
Book Page at BookBrowse.
Lit Guide from LitLovers.
To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's
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Richard Ford on Canada (Wall Street Journal):
Richard Ford reads from Canada (PBS NewsHour):
Title Read-alikes: The Round House by Louise Erdrich; The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall; Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks; Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden; The Painter by Peter Heller; Peace Like a River by Leif Enger; Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje; History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund; Still Missing by Chevy Stevens; Wyoming by J. P. Gritton; El Paso by Winston Groom; You Must Set Forth at Dawn by Wole Soyinka; and Simón
by Miqui Otero.
I have read a few reviews for this one lately and they are all raves. I'm going to have to pick me up a copy. Thanks for the review.Ford Canada
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