BookBrowse Reviews Consumption: A penetrating portrait of generation divisions and cultural dissonance set in a small Inuit community

At first glance the title of this exceptional first novel would seem to refer to the common name for tuberculosis, so named because the infection appears to consume people from within. However, as the novel progresses, consumption takes on a different meaning as we see the Inuit way of life and even the land they live on being consumed by "civilization" and the quest for profit.

Consumption centers on the lives of one small family in a small community of Inuits living in Rankin Inlet between the 1970s and 1990s. By the end of the 1980s, almost all the Inuits in the area had left their nomadic lives behind in order to work in the mines run by Kablunauks (the Inuit word for Caucasians, meaning hairy eyebrows and bellies), a...