"These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice...and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it,
one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.
"
Summoned to the deathbed of a long-ago lover, Evelyn is overcome by emotion. Off her medications, she impulsively steals a kayak and embarks on a quest that takes her deep into the Canadian wilderness in order to find her lost son, Tom. On the way to Sointula,
a remote fishing village off Vancouver Island, she gains a traveling companion, Peter Gore, a writer working on the quintessential book on the region. Stymied by illness, writer's block, and whiskey, Peter makes an unlikely and unreliable shipmate and paramour.
Tom, the survivor of a gunshot wound that slowed his speech and his drug-dealing, finds solace in his isolated life, collecting data for a whale researcher. As Evelyn and Peter approach, Tom waits for the whales' irregular visits to the water's edge. Like
the novels of David Malouf and Jonathan Raban, Sointula is a celebration of place, a novel where the landscape comes as fully alive as its memorable characters.
Sointula
