OPEN PIT

On the eve of NorthOre's opening a new mining operation in El Salvador in 2005, a group of Canadian human-rights activists are taken hostage by a former revolutionary fighter who demands that the company stop production at the open-pit gold mine and allow his family's remains to be exhumed. The mine's Canadian owner, however, decides on a combined police and security force action to end the standoff. For most of the hostages, this is the first time this sort of thing has ever happened to them. For Danielle Byrd, the situation is all too familiar, as she was there twenty years previously as an embedded journalist with a guerrilla faction during the country's civil war. Now, her daughter Aida must herself travel to the scarred landscape and choose her allies carefully if she wants to see her mother alive once more.

Marguerite Pigeon's first novel is a gripping and tense political thriller as well as a genre-busting literary work, exploring a clash between two cultures and the true cost of doing business in the era of globalization.

With character-driven action and imagery reminiscent of Georges Arnaud's The Wages of Fear and a complex plot that recalls John Le Carré's The Constant Gardener, Open Pit explores the legacy of violent conflict in a complex, shifting present.

After working in radio and television news, Marguerite Pigeon travelled to South America to volunteer with an indigenous organization dealing with land issues. Her writing has appeared in Grain, subTerrain, and The Dalhousie Review.