Joseph Boyden, fiction instructor in the UBC Creative Writing program, in The National Post:
His new novel not only revisits the landscape of his childhood but transports readers back to Canada’s formative years. It is a novel that should cement his status as one of the most important Canadian writers working today, and, if all breaks right, one that will establish his name beyond our borders. The Orenda is by turns beautiful and brutal, harrowing and haunting, and the novel Boyden’s career has been building towards, even if he didn’t know it.
“This is a novel about my Jesuit blood, my Anishinaabe blood, my Indian blood. It’s a novel about where I grew up, and [a] part of Canadian history that’s just absolutely — to me — fascinating and incredibly rich,” he says, the evening sun slowly descending beneath the trees. “This is the novel I was always meant to write.”
Read the rest at The National Post.
