Hummingbird: A Novel

Shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2018
and
Winner of the 2018 Edward Stanford Award for Fiction with a Sense of Place

“What you could change and alter could never be finished or complete or dead. This is what I had been told back then, and what I had tried very hard to believe in since.”
Beside a lake in the northern Ontario wilderness, fifteen-year-old Zachary Tayler lives a lonely life with his father, his only neighbours a leech trapper, an eccentric millionaire and an expert in snow. All Zack has for company is the harsh and moody landscape, which holds both beauty and terror in its depths and whispers with the promise of dark, secret spaces and undiscovered worlds.

Summer and life change with the arrival of the mysterious Eva Spiller, who is determined to find the spot where her parents disappeared in a floatplane after flying off from the lake. While trying to navigate between summer and winter, the living and the dead, the past and the present, Zack and Eva grow closer. The people of Sitting Down Lake will have to rely on each other to come to terms with the past and realize that death is never final: something always remains.

In his fifth novel, award-winning author Tristan Hughes has created a vivid and poetic coming-of-age story about loss, absence and redemption.