“What you could change and alter could never be finished or complete or dead. This is what I had been told back then, and what I had tried very hard to believe in since.”

Beside a lake in the northern Ontario wilderness, fifteen-year-old Zachary Tayler lives a lonely life with his father, his only neighbours a leech trapper, an eccentric millionaire and an expert in snow. All Zack has for company is the harsh and moody landscape, which holds both beauty and terror in its depths and whispers with the promise of dark, secret spaces and undiscovered worlds.

Summer and life change with the arrival of the mysterious Eva Spiller, who is determined to find the spot where her parents disappeared in a floatplane after flying off from the lake. While trying to navigate between summer and winter, the living and the dead, the past and the present, Zack and Eva grow closer. The people of Sitting Down Lake will have to rely on each other to come to terms with the past and realize that death is never final: something always remains.

In his fifth novel, award-winning author Tristan Hughes has created a vivid and poetic coming-of-age story about loss, absence and redemption.

Review Quotes and Endorsements

"Superbly accomplished ... Hughes' prose is startling and luminous." —Financial Times

“Eye Lake is a sturdy and ... compelling novel, ripe with luminous prose and well-sustained metaphor, a fine investigation of isolation, work, family, the Canadian pioneer spirit and the doomed communities that linger in opportunity's wake." —National Post

“Hughes has done an exquisite job plotting Eye Lake, but this is only a small part of the novel's pleasures ... [A] deeply satisfying read.” — Quill and Quire

“Rarely has there been a more endearing storyteller ... [Hughes's] story of a small town growing and declining on the whims of a few outsize personalities also is the story of families, boom to bust.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Folded within the seemingly simple narratives of Hughes' novel, is a lovely rumination on what it means for the world to end, however small that world may be.” —This Magazine

Tristan Hughes was born in Atikokan, Ontario, and brought up on the Welsh island of Ynys Mon. He has a PhD in literature from King’s College, Cambridge and has taught courses on American literature and creative writing at Cambridge, Leipzig, Bangor and Cardiff. He won the Rhys Davies Short Story Award in 2002 and wrote his first novel, The Tower (2004), while spending seven months in a body cast after breaking his back falling off the walls of a castle. Soon after he published Send My Cold Bones Home (2006) and Revenant (2008), all set on Ynys Mon and highly praised in the UK. His most recent novels Eye Lake (2011) and its follow-up, Hummingbird, are set in the northern Ontario town of Crooked River, based on Atikokan, where Hughes spent his childhood summers. Tristan Hughes is a senior lecturer and an AHRC Fellow in Creative Writing at Cardiff University who splits his time between Cardiff and Atikokan.

Tristan Hughes' profile page