It is summer and the Canadian Rockies are on fire. As the forests blaze, Alan West heads into their shadows, returning from university to his grandfather's home in the remote Kootenay Valley, where the man who raised him has suffered a heart attack. Confronting his own mortality, the tough and taciturn Cecil West has a dying request for his grandson: track down the father Alan has never known so that the old man can make peace with him. And so Alan begins his search for the elusive Jack West, a man who skipped town before his son could walk and of whom his grandfather has always refused to speak. His quest will lead him to Archer, an old American soldier who decades ago went AWOL across the border into Canada. Archer has been carrying a heavy burden for many years, and through him Alan learns the stories of two broken families who came together, got too close, and then fell apart in tragic ways. Ballistics is a remarkable first novel, about family ties and the wounds that can linger for generations when those relationships are betrayed.
Author
I am the author of two books, Ballistics and Once You Break a Knuckle, as well as a host of other separately published stories and essays, some of which have won prizes like BBC Short Story Award, the CBC Canada Writes Story Prize, and the Manchester Fiction Prize. That's the bones of my bio, same one you'll find on other websites or in the sleeves of my two books. I love books but I also love nerd stuff. I'm happy to dump dozens of hours into video game in a single sitting and I get unacceptably excited waiting for the latest superhero flick to start. I once put 600 hours into building a fibreglass Iron Man suit for my wife for Halloween (it had light-up eyes) which she danced to the end of love late into the night. I think of this as an outlet for unspent or untapped creative energy; I spend so much time at a desk, in front of a screen, that it is sometimes nice to work with my hands, even if I'm working on soldering an LED into a replica arc reactor. I grew up in the Kootenays and some part of the small town boy remains. I can chop lumber if under duress. I wish I owned a truck.
