Description
In The Tent Peg, award-winning novelist Aritha van Herk uses her unerring perception and impressive literary skill to capture the mystical mood of the Arctic and the people who are drawn to it.
In this intriguing story, a young woman who disguises herself as a man to work in a uranium prospecting camp deep in the Yukon mountains. J.L. is on the run from an empty heart and is desperate for solitude. Yet solitude eludes her from the moment she hangs up her pots and pans in the cook tent, and the men in the camp begin to drift toward her, drawn by her silence. These men are drifters, romantics and outcasts - men who have come to the North in search of answers for questions they can't define.
About the author
Aritha van Herk teaches Creative Writing, Canadian Literature and Contemporary Narrative. Her novels include Judith, The Tent Peg, No Fixed Address (nominated for the Governor General's Award for fiction), Places Far From Ellesmere (a geografictione) and Restlessness. Her critical works, A Frozen Tongue (ficto-criticism) and In Visible Ink (crypto-frictions) stretch the boundaries of the essay and interrogate questions of reading and writing as aspects of narrative subversion. With Mavericks: an Incorrigible History of Alberta (winner of the Grant MacEwan Author's Award) van Herk ventured into new territory, transforming history into a narratological spectacle. That book frames the new permanent exhibition that opened at the Glenbow Museum in 2007. van Herk is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and is active in Canada's literary and cultural life, writing articles and reviews as well as creative work. She has served on many juries, including the Governor General's Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. She is well known in the broader community of the city, the province, and the country as a writer and a public intellectual.
Editorial Reviews
"The inevitable confrontations in this memorable novel leave no one unchanged."
— Library Journal
"Unusual, skilled fiction. . . . Van Herk successfully manipulates an unusual narrative."
— Booklist
"Written with care, sensitivity and considerable style."
— Publisher's Weekly
"Aritha van Herk's creation of a mystical world infiltrated by reality captures little blue moments of intensity and truth that can hurt."
— Dallas Times-Herald
Other titles by
Recognition and Revelation
Short Nonfiction Writings
Robert Kroetsch
Essayist, Novelist, Poet
Stampede and the Westness of West
Prairie Gothic
Photographs by George Webber
The Canadian Postmodern
A Study of Contemporary Canadian Fiction, Reissue
In This Place
Calgary 2004-2011
Bear
One West, Two Myths II
Essays on Comparison
Unsettled Pasts
Reconceiving the West through Women's History
