A climate-crisis novel of eco-terrorism and bike-courier love.
Paperback, 398 pages
ISBN: 9789814882187
Buy now from Kinokuniya or Go Guru
Seventeen year-old Ocean Janak has grown up the privileged daughter of Blake, a geologist turned Calgary oil sands executive. When she falls for Rory McAllister, a Calgary bike courier who secretly scans many of the oil contracts he’s paid to deliver, she finds a lover and comrade-in-green-arms. Alarmed by the historical Project Cauldron—the private (and patented!) American proposal to liquefy the oil in Alberta’s tar sands with nuclear bombs—the increasingly militant green lovers go north to Fort McMurray with the plan of exploding the containment wall of an oil-sands tailings pond dam to flood the entire region in toxins and bring the industry to a halt. The environmental racism that finds Canada’s Indigenous poisoned is also resented by Luke Simon, a Cree sniper whose bile-duct cancer brought him home prematurely from the war in Afghanistan. He, too, has a plan to stop the sands.
“A pertinent and moving novel that covers so much ground, yet feels personal to the reader. I felt as if I was hurtling through an adventure while also learning a great deal about Canada’s diverse landscape and all the reverberating historical complexities of belonging and ownership. With assured prose and sensitivity to his characters, Darryl Whetter brings us a highly original and necessary story in these times of environmental and political uncertainty.”
— Balli Kaur Jaswal, author of the Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows
“Who knew a climate-crisis novel could be so nuanced and big-hearted?”
— Cheryl Tan, Author of Sarong Party Girls