COME BACK

From one of Canada's most celebrated writers and a two-time winner of the Governor General's Literary Award, Come Back is an intense novel of loss, memory, and the limitless nature of familial love.

Hal Wiens, a retired professor, is mourning the sudden death of his loving wife, Yo. To get through each day, he relies on the bare comfort of routine and regular phone calls to his children Dennis and Miriam, who live in distant cities with their families. One snowy April morning, while drinking coffee with his Dené friend Owl in south-side Edmonton, he sees a tall man in an orange down-filled jacket walk past on the sidewalk. The jacket, the posture, the head and hair are unmistakable: it's his beloved oldest son, Gabriel. But it can't be, Gabriel killed himself 25 years ago. The sighting throws Hal's inert life into tumult. While trying to track down the man, he is irresistibly compelled to revisit the diaries, journals and pictures Gabe left behind, to unfold the mystery of his son's death. Through Gabe's own eyes we begin to understand the covert sensibilities that corroded the hope and light his family knew in him. As he becomes absorbed in his son's life, lost on a tide of relentless memory, Hal's grief and guilt is portrayed with a stunning immediacy, drawing us into a powerful emotional and spiritual journey. Come Back is a rare and beautiful novel about the humanity of living and dying, a lyrical masterwork from one of our most treasured writers. RUDY WIEBE is the award-winning author of sixteen books, including Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest and The Temptations of Big Bear. As a prairie writer, he has often concerned himself with Native stories, feeling place of birth to be more important than blood ancestry. Wiebe lives in Edmonton.