Hummingbird - by Tristan Hughes (Paperback)

About the Book

"What you could change and alter could never be finished or complete or dead. This is what I had been told back then, and what I had tried very hard to believe in since." Beside a lake in the northern Ontario wilderness, fifteen-year-old Zachary Tayler lives a lonely life with his father, his only neighbours a leech trapper, an eccentric millionaire and an expert in snow. All Zack has for company is the harsh and moody landscape, which holds both beauty and terror in its depths and whispers with the promise of dark, secret spaces and undiscovered worlds. Summer and life change with the arrival of the mysterious Eva Spiller, who is determined to find the spot where her parents disappeared in a floatplane after flying off from the lake. While trying to navigate between summer and winter, the living and the dead, the past and the present, Zack and Eva grow closer. The people of Sitting Down Lake will have to rely on each other to come to terms with the past and realize that death is never final: something always remains. In his fifth novel, award-winning author Tristan Hughes has created a vivid and poetic coming-of-age story about loss, absence and redemption.

Book Synopsis

"What you could change and alter could never be finished or complete or dead. This is what I had been told back then, and what I had tried very hard to believe in since." Beside a lake in the northern Ontario wilderness, fifteen-year-old Zachary Tayler lives a lonely life with his father, his only neighbours a leech trapper, an eccentric millionaire and an expert in snow. All Zack has for company is the harsh and moody landscape, which holds both beauty and terror in its depths and whispers with the promise of dark, secret spaces and undiscovered worlds. Summer and life change with the arrival of the mysterious Eva Spiller, who is determined to find the spot where her parents disappeared in a floatplane after flying off from the lake. While trying to navigate between summer and winter, the living and the dead, the past and the present, Zack and Eva grow closer. The people of Sitting Down Lake will have to rely on each other to come to terms with the past and realize that death is never final: something always remains. In his fifth novel, award-winning author Tristan Hughes has created a vivid and poetic coming-of-age story about loss, absence and redemption. Review Quotes and Endorsements "Superbly accomplished ... Hughes' prose is startling and luminous." --Financial Times "Eye Lake is a sturdy and ... compelling novel, ripe with luminous prose and well-sustained metaphor, a fine investigation of isolation, work, family, the Canadian pioneer spirit and the doomed communities that linger in opportunity's wake." --National Post "Hughes has done an exquisite job plotting Eye Lake, but this is only a small part of the novel's pleasures ... [A] deeply satisfying read." -- Quill and Quire "Rarely has there been a more endearing storyteller ... [Hughes's] story of a small town growing and declining on the whims of a few outsize personalities also is the story of families, boom to bust." -- Minneapolis Star Tribune "Folded within the seemingly simple narratives of Hughes' novel, is a lovely rumination on what it means for the world to end, however small that world may be." --This Magazine

Review Quotes

Review Quotes and Endorsements "Superbly accomplished ... Hughes' prose is startling and luminous." --Financial Times "Eye Lake is a sturdy and ... compelling novel, ripe with luminous prose and well-sustained metaphor, a fine investigation of isolation, work, family, the Canadian pioneer spirit and the doomed communities that linger in opportunity's wake." --National Post "Hughes has done an exquisite job plotting Eye Lake, but this is only a small part of the novel's pleasures ... [A] deeply satisfying read." -- Quill and Quire "Rarely has there been a more endearing storyteller ... [Hughes's] story of a small town growing and declining on the whims of a few outsize personalities also is the story of families, boom to bust." -- Minneapolis Star Tribune "Folded within the seemingly simple narratives of Hughes' novel, is a lovely rumination on what it means for the world to end, however small that world may be." --This Magazine "Is inheritance something you construct, or something that is given to you? Are freedom and mobility precious gifts, or wretched pollutants? These are some of the questions Hughes's novel asks.... Hughes is a very good writer, if 'good writing' has to do with precision, eloquence, beauty and passionately held belief." -- Times Literary Supplement (on Revenant) "A beautiful novel, rich in the complexities of childhood love and obsession, of adult remorse and the insatiable yearning for absolution." --Madeline Thein (on Revenant) "A provocative exploration of the difficulty of leaving childhood behind, and about how being treated like an outsider all your life will leave you with a tragic sense of entitlement." -- The Walrus (on Revenant) "Pastoral, flinty and fierce" -- The Independent