Ballistics: A Novel - Softcover

Wilson, D. W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1620400782 ISBN 13: 9781620400784

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2014

Synopsis

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, wherethe 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.

About this title

About the Author:

D.W. Wilson was born and raised in the small towns of the Kootenay Valley, British Columbia. He is the recipient of the University of East Anglia's inaugural Man Booker Prize Scholarship - the most prestigious award available to students in the MA program. Wilson's short stories have been awarded the BBC National Short Story Award and the CBC Short Story Prize. This is his first novel. He currently lives in London.

From Booklist:

This first novel by Canadian Wilson is set in a lushly described western Canada. In the 1960s, the area attracted American visitors, exiles, and fugitives, one of whom, AWOL army veteran Archer Cole, is a central figure in this mostly gripping if somewhat overwritten story. Unwilling to face another tour of duty in Vietnam, Archer, along with his 14-year-old daughter, Linnea, has crossed the border. In isolated British Columbia, they meet the cantankerous Cecil West and his then-adolescent son, Jack. In narratives alternating in time and told by Archer and Jack’s son, Alan, later grown and returned home from a stalled academic career, we learn, when Cecil sends Alan to find his dad, who left when Alan was a year old, the intricate circumstances surrounding that departure. Further complicated by a forest fire (fire plays a major role in this novel), the action heads toward an inevitable crisis. Though not unexpected, the ensuing action is forcefully related. Readers, who may be reminded of Russell Banks or the Ken Kesey of Sometimes a Great Notion, will find this a muscular, often violent, and dramatic story. --Mark Levine

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1620400782
• ISBN 13: 9781620400784
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400