Inukshuk

"Hauntingly honest and emotionally resonant." --"Publishers Weekly" (starred review)

"Gregory Spatz's prose is as clean and sparkling as a new fall of snow." --JANET FITCH, author of "White Oleander" and "Paint it Black"

"At its heart "Inukshuk" is about family. But Spatz has transfigured this beautifully told, wise story with history and myth, poetry and magic into something rarer, stranger and altogether amazing. A book that points unerringly true north." --KAREN JOY FOWLER, author of "The Jane Austen Book Club" and "Wit's End"

""Inukshuk" is a feat of empathy and honesty, a taut tale of fear and resentment and other threats from within, meticulously observed and fearlessly rendered in vivid, authoritative, gripping prose. It's a virtuoso performance." --DOUG DORST, author of "Alive in Necropolis" and "The Surf Guru"

"One of the most innovative and unusual fictional incarnations I've ever read of the persistent allure of Sir John Franklin's final, fatal Arctic voyage. It's a remarkable accomplishment." --RUSSELL POTTER, author of Arctic Spectacles

John Franklin has moved his fifteen-year-old son to the remote northern Canadian town of Houndstitch to make a new life together after his wife, Thomas' mother, left them. Mourning her disappearance, John, a high school English teacher, writes poetry and escapes into an affair, while Thomas withdraws into a fantasy recreation of the infamous Victorian-era arctic expedition led by British explorer Sir John Franklin. With teenage bravado, Thomas gives himself scurvy so that he can sympathize with the characters in the film of his mind--and is almost lost himself.

While told over the course of only a few days, this gripping tale slips through time, powerfully evoking a modern family in distress and the legendary Franklin crew's descent into despair, madness, and cannibalism on the Arctic tundra.

Gregory Spatz is the author of three previous books of fiction and his stories have appeared in many publications, including "The New Yorker." A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and recipient of a Washington State Book Award, he teaches at Eastern Washington University in Spokane and plays the fiddle and tours with Mighty Squirrel and in the Juno-nominated bluegrass band John Reischman and the Jaybirds.