A Novel
by D. W. Wilson
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jun 2013
400 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
It is summer and the Canadian Rockies are on fire. As the forests blaze, Alan West heads into their shadows, returning from university to his grandfather's home in the remote Kootenay Valley, wherethe man who raised him has suffered a heart attack. Confronting his own mortality, the tough and taciturn Cecil West has a dying request for his grandson: track down the father Alan has never known so that the old man can make peace with him.
And so Alan begins his search for the elusive Jack West, a man who skipped town before his son could walk and of whom his grandfather has always refused to speak. His quest will lead him to Archer, an old American soldier who decades ago went AWOL across the border into Canada. Archer has been carrying a heavy burden for many years, and through him Alan learns the stories of two broken families who came together, got too close, and then fell apart in tragic ways.
Ballistics is a remarkable first novel, about family ties and the wounds that can linger for generations when those relationships are betrayed.
"The rugged individualism and frontier spirit of the Canadian Rockies are fully on display in Wilson's impressive debut novel." - Publishers Weekly
"Too many beatings and too much philosophical brooding bog down an overextended story straining for elegiac and epic heights." - Kirkus
"Wilson's most significant debt may be to a less obvious source: the songs of Bruce Springsteen. Like the Boss, Wilson takes as his subjects working men who prefer outdoor pursuits and manual labour and who tend to blow off steam by drinking beer and fighting. Also like Springsteen, there is a romanticism to his writing that occasionally threatens to tilt over into sentimentality." - The Globe and Mail, Steven W. Beattie
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