THE SPAWNING GROUNDS

The Spawning Grounds is full of those qualities Gail's fans love: it's an intimate family saga rooted in the Thompson-Shuswap region of British Columbia, and saturated with the history of the place. A bold new story that bridges Native and white cultures across a bend in a river where the salmon run.

On one side of the river is a ranch once owned by Eugene Robertson, who came in the gold rush around 1860, and stayed on as a homesteader. On the other side is a Shuswap community that has its own tangled history with the river--and the whites. At the heart of the novel are Hannah and Brandon Robertson, teenagers who have been raised by their grandfather after they lost their mother. As the novel opens, the river is dying, its flow reduced to a trickle, and Hannah is carrying salmon past the choke point to the spawning grounds while her childhood best friend, Alex, leads a Native protest against the development further threatening the river. When drowning nearly claims the lives of both Hannah's grandfather and her little brother, their world is thrown into chaos. Hannah, Alex, and most especially Brandon come to doubt their own reality as they are pulled deep into Brandon's numinous visions, which summon the myths of Shuswap culture and tragic family stories of the past.
The novel hovers beautifully in the fluid boundary between past and present, between the ordinary world and the world of the spirit, all disordered by the human and environmental crises that have knit the white and Native worlds together in love, and hate, and tragedy for 150 years. Can Hannah and her brother, and Alex, find a way forward that will neither destroy the river nor themselves?

The Spawning Grounds is full of those qualities Gail's fans love: here is an intimate family saga, with a striking female protagonist, situated in the spectacular Thompson-Shuswap region, and saturated with the history of the place. But the novel is also a bold new reach, a story that floats beautifully on the fluid boundary between white and native cultures, between past and present and between the ordinary world and that of myth and the spirit.

Gail Anderson-Dargatz is the award-winning author of The Cure for Death by Lighting and A Recipe for Bees, both of which were international bestsellers and finalists for the Giller Prize. The Cure for Death by Lightning won the UK's Betty Trask Prize, among other awards. Both Turtle Valley and A Rhinestone Button were national bestsellers. She mentors writers online and lives in the Shuswap region of British Columbia, the landscape of The Spawning Grounds.

Visit her wonderful website at: www.gailanderson-dargatz.ca