by Alexi Zetner ~ Knopf CanadaTouch is set in the fictional village of Sawgamet, BC, a logging and mining area where the winters are so cold that one year the snow was piled three stories high until July. The ensuring melt caused a runoff akin to a small tsunami. So goes the legend!
Stephen has returned home to be with his dying mother. He is beset by memories of his childhood, and while he is often the narrator, the story reaches back to his grandfather, Jeannot, who found gold and sparked a gold rush in the northern frontier town.
A terrible accident on the melting river kills Stephen’s father and sister, and the image of them frozen in ice, hands reaching toward each other, floats through the novel, visually eerie and yet strangely comforting. “Even through the plate of frozen river covering them, we saw clearly that little more than the width of an ax blade separated my father’s two hands from my sister’s one.”
A profound sense of cold pervades Zentner’s novel. The timelines are fluid as he weaves his story through the generations and his intense narrative style breathes life into the startling lives of the townspeople as they struggle to survive the harsh northern winters. Drifting around the edges of the story are spirits and golden caribou, magic realism born of the north and integrated into the culture of the frontier towns and villages. Touch is a terrific story by a talented new Canadian writer.
Alexi Zentner’s short stories have been published in magazines, journals and anthologies. Touch is his first novel and will be published internationally as well as in North America. Born in Kitchener, Ontario, he now lives in Ithaca, New York.
