HIGH ARROW
The
Novel
She was killed in a hit-and-run. Now a dam will flood their valley. Time is running out to find her killer.
It’s 1960 and the Canada-U.S. Columbia River Treaty is about to spur the rise of three dams north of the border
A preacher with an eye to the Minto sternwheeler. A sickly caretaker of a crumbling estate. A girl with strange intuition. A beguiling immigrant reporter. Who can Jake trust? And can he trust himself?
Jake O’Reilly, 22, lives with his mother, an alcoholic ravaged by grief after the deaths of her husband from illness and her daughter from a hit-and-run. They live a quiet life on the lower Arrow Lake, Jake working on a tugboat as a marine logger. Still reeling from his sister’s untimely death, Jake has turned inward, cutting himself off from most people.
When he learns the government favours a dam that will flood his valley, he knows this is his last chance to solve his sister’s hit-and-run before witnesses disperse and evidence is lost.
In an increasingly destabilized world where houses burn, neighbours feud, and his own home sits below the high water line, he must decide who he can trust before it’s too late.
“Laura is a meticulous craftsperson who brings care into both the research and the editing process. The questions with which she wrestles in her manuscript — what are our motives for major construction projects and are they justifiable for the health of our communities and our planet? Who are the casualties of dam-building? What gets lost and swept under the floodwaters when we reshape valleys? — are continually on our minds as we renegotiate the conditions of the Columbia River Treaty and construct future dams and other industrial projects. Indeed, considering such questions is an essential task in our time.
Peter Takach
Writer & Teacher