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, the author of Moon of Hunger, The Efficiency of Killers, and Parables and Rain (all Penumbra Press, 1983-1993), was born in Comox, B.C., in 1957. His early years were spent as an Air Force gypsy travelling from base to base. His father eventually retired in North Bay, Ontario, where McCulloch and his son, Matthew, reside. McCulloch comes from mixed European and Cree parentage, and his Native heritage has always been a source of great pride. Many social factors in his life and in the lives of his ancestors, however, made his a somewhat abstract inheritance. In the early eighties, McCulloch worked on several reserves in northern Alberta, an experience that became the genesis for his first collection of poetry and for the novel Childforever.

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