Deloume Road

From a breathtakingly talented new writer: a beautifully written, gripping novel that weaves storytelling magic, life, love, and tragedy into the beauty of the Canadian landscape.

Deloume Road takes us into a hot August month on Vancouver Island during the first Gulf War, to a small rural community where the children's lives play out unchangingly in the woods and secret places - until they discover an object from the past that will come to haunt them all. Slowly we discover how intertwined are the lives of recent comers with long established neighbours: a Ukrainian butcher who yearns for his wife and small son left behind - and learns something disturbing; a widowed Korean girl who fears for the life of the baby she is carrying; a Native artist whose pilot son has crashed in the wilderness… And behind them all, the shadow of Gerard Deloume, whose suicide in 1899 set off a sequence of events that erupt a century later with violent, tragic consequences.

Matthew Hooton, with lovely skill, and an assured voice, creates an indelible sense of a small community along a country road and the ties that bind us, celebrating the differences and connections between the Korean language and English, between losing a loved one to war and pulling the trigger, about summer and the first rain….