Who is Will Sawnet? After his father's death, a young man learns that his mother was Native, and that he was adopted. Shocked and disoriented by the sudden discovery that his past was a lie, Will quits his newspaper job and takes to the road in desperate search of his real mother. This is a satisfying, compelling novel filled with humour, poignancy, tragedy, and caring detail, as Will drives north to the Red Clay Reserve, teetering between selves: is he Will Sawnet, the name his white parents always called him, or Billy Childforever, the ironic name his Cree girlfriend, Agnes, has given him? In Childforever, Cree-Scottish writer Ian McCulloch has created a powerful, urgent exploration of a crisis in identity and its resolution.

Ian McCulloch (1957-2019) was born in Comox, B.C. and raised in Northern Ontario. A member of the Chapleau Cree First Nation (Fox Lake), his writing was deeply influenced by family and his indigenous heritage. He was the author of three books of poetry: The Moon of Hunger (Penumbra, 1982), The Efficiency of Killers (Penumbra, 1988) and Parables and Rain (Penumbra, 1993) and the chapbooks, A Balsam to Ease All Pains (Alburnum Press, 1998), Certain Humans and A Box of Light (both above/ground press, 2019). He was also the author of the novel Childforever (Mercury, 1996). A founding member of Northern Ontario's longest-running reading series, The Conspiracy of Three.

Ian McCulloch's profile page