Why a Booktrail?
2000s: Shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards 2018
Hummingbird
What you need to know before your trail
Beside a lake in the northern Canadian wilderness, fifteen-year-old Zachary Tayler lives a lonely and isolated life with his father. His only neighbours are a leech trapper, an eccentric millionaire, and an expert in snow. But then one summer the enigmatic and shape-shifting Eva Spiller arrives in search of the remains of her parents and together they embark on a strange and disconcerting journey of discovery.
Nothing at Sitting Down Lake is quite as it seems. The forest hides ruins and mysteries; the past can never be fully understood. And as Zach and Eva make their way through this haunted landscape, they move ever closer towards an acceptance of what in the end is lost and what can truly be found.
Locations
ResetTravel Guide
Northern Ontario
The author was born in northern Ontario (Antikokan ) and brought up on the Welsh island of Ynys Mon so he’s used to islands and areas of rural wilderness. The book evokes a land and landscape which is a maze of lakes, swamps, islands and a way of life which is unparalleled anywhere else. This is a rural paradise but also a one where the land is in control and its energy is raw and unforgiving. The houses are rusty and ramshackle – the prose evokes this beautifully – and it immerses you with “the curve of its horizon” and its glittering bays” not to mention the “rusty red shacks” which pepper the land.
Zachary Taylor grows up in two places:
“One was a few miles outside a small town called Crooked River in northern Ontario; the other a camp on Sitting Down Lake”
“To get to the lake, we’d take the train from Crooked River, hitching a ride in the caboose. There’s weren’t many scheduled stops at the lake but, if you arranged things with the driver, he’d bring the train to a swift standstill there, amidst a frantic tossing of bags and cases. And this is how each summer began – watching the red of the caboose recede into the distance, surrounded by the scattered debris of out stores and belongings as though we were the lone survivors of some kind o disaster.
Crooked River (fictional)
“Crooked River had no suburbs: there was the town the few homes – like ours – straggled out along the highway and then an awful lot of nothing for a long way in either direction. You lived in town or you lived out of town in the bush. Tax-purposes aside, there were no purlieus or other in -between places”
Booktrailer Review
Susan: @thebooktrailer
Ooh this novel made me shiver! It was a novel which spoke to me as I love the landscape of Ontario and felt I had to read it The writing, the setting, the overall feeling of it all.
And that cover! It’s the setting which shines here. The characters are thin and sparse but for me that doesn’t really matter in a way as the story is so ethereal and immersive. They are very eccentric however and there’s something unnerving about them that trickles into the waters of the lake
It almost reads as a travelogue in places as the landscape takes over and the glaciers, horseshoe bends and cabins which stand on stilts like something out of a fairytale..
It’s a brutal and awful world up there in parts of the novel – this is not the land for the unprepared. It bites, it stabs, it takes you hostage and chills. But it can also enchant and fascinate and this novel sways between the two.
The theme of loss runs throughout the novel and indeed the landscape like a stream of regret.
Booktrail Boarding Pass: Hummingbird
Destination: Ontario Author/Guide: Tristan Hughes Departure Time: 2000s
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