Deloume Road

by Matthew Hooton

Alfred Knopf Canada

  ~ Review in Halifax Herald, March 2010

In 1996, Knopf Canada’s launched The New Face of Fiction, a publishing program designed to publicize the best of new fiction writers.  The New Face of Fiction looks for first time writers who reveal something of Canadian life or of the human soul, and has launched the careers of many successful Canadian writers, including Ann-Marie MacDonald, Yann Martel and Dionne Brand.  Matthew Hooton stands in illustrious company.

In some ways, reading Delhoume Road is like following a blog. The chapters are short, the characters many, and each of them tells their own part as the larger story unfolds and winds gently toward an ending that is hard to see coming.

Hooton’s characters all live on Delhoume road, connected as neighbours, struggling to make a living, looking out for each other in their own ways.

There is Sue Hwa, heavily pregnant, a young Korean immigrant widowed by the Gulf war.  Her neighbour, Al Henry,  haunted by his role in the Korean war, The Butcher, a Ukrainian immigrant, saving every penny to bring his wife and daughter to Canada.  And pivotal to the story are Matthew, Josh and Miles, boys whose lives interweave with their

Trailing through the lives of the inhabitants of Delhoume Road is the surveyor, who hanged himself in 1899 on Mt Baldy.  His death caused barely a ripple at the time, but the repercussions of a careless act by those who found him cause a profound, cataclysmic effect on the inhabitants of Delhoume Road more than 100 years later.

                                                                                                                                                            

Matthew Hooton grew up on Vancouver Island.  He wrote non-fiction articles before completing an MA in Creative Writing in UK.  He has worked as an editor and teacher in South Korea, and now lives in Victoria, BC.