Snow Bird

Jason Thunder still remembers that red lollipop-baby's first sugar high.

That day, the candy was shared amongst the cousins, and he slept close to his parents. He must have been teething; his father's knuckle tasted like guitar strings, salt, and nicotine. Jason has been chasing the sensations of that single day all his life-the rush, the comfort, the love. It ignited his relationship to addiction.

Poor in a wealthy country, Jason is sentenced to a lifetime of labour. In his teens, he buckles under his mother's impossible expectations as he provides for his siblings. If it wasn't for his grandfather's Sage, or that winter skating on the lake, he might have lost himself.

Though his babies are born into broken homes, Jason wants to love and provide for them. On the oil rigs, as a high-rise scaffolder, training to be Harley-Davidson technician, and driving long-haul ice road trucks into the Arctic, Jason wants more than anything to be a proud man. But in a boom-and-bust world, Jason Thunder is racing to catch his steadfast dreams.

This richly poetic novel follows a Métis man's autobiographical coming-of-age, and captures the precarious balance between hope and despair, trauma and beauty.