The Back of the Turtle

The Back of the Turtle

First edition cover
Author Thomas King
Country Canada
Language English
Genre fiction
Publisher Doubleday Canada
Publication date
 2014
Media type Print (hardback & paperback)
Pages 518 pp.
ISBN 978-1-4434-3162-0
OCLC 890680218

The Back of the Turtle is a novel by Thomas King.[1] Published by Doubleday Canada in 2014,[1] the novel won the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction at the 2014 Governor General's Awards.[2]

The novel's central character is Gabriel Quinn, a successful scientist of First Nations descent working for the multinational chemical company Domidion. Returning for a visit to Smoke River, the Indian reserve in British Columbia where his mother grew up, he finds a virtually deserted ghost town, and soon learns that GreenSweep, the defoliant product he helped to develop for the company, destroyed the local environment and killed or drove away the community's residents.[3] Distraught over his role in the community's destruction, he plans to commit suicide by drowning himself in the Pacific Ocean, but is drawn into a journey of spiritual redemption after jumping into the water to save a group of people from drowning.[3] After the ordeal, he meets Mara, a young woman who lost her family in the Kali Creek crisis. Meanwhile, in Toronto, Domidion CEO Dorian Asher is drawn into a media frenzy as the company is implicated in another unfolding environmental disaster in the Athabasca Oil Sands.[4]

King began writing the novel in the early 2000s while teaching at the University of Guelph,[1] but set it aside for several years to write his non-fiction book The Inconvenient Indian,[1] which won the RBC Taylor Prize earlier in 2014.[5]

References


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