“An essential vein feeding a vast piece of land, the river could just as easily send you to your death, and one had to approach it with humility.”

The story of an exiled islander who is searching for a way back, swimming against the current towards an identity sculpted by the river and shrouded in the familial and popular myths of his youth.

Is an island truly a closed place, cut off from everything around it by water on all sides? Or is it open, its shores offering an infinite horizon to the world? Before his first child is born, Félix must find an answer to this question. He feels compelled to return to the place he was born, one stormy night all those years ago, and make peace with the ghost of his own father whose untimely death uprooted him and his mother.

As he completes his solitary journey and learns to tame the house he is staying in, one creak at a time, Félix writes to Sarah, who has travelled back to the Far North of her own childhood. But we can never return to the places of our past. Instead, we must settle into the space they occupy in our memory.

A tender debut that hits all the right notes, endearing the reader to its flawed protagonist, beautiful in his aching fragility.

The unbridled power of the natural elements—wind, snow and water— courses through the story until it takes on epic proportions.