River Meets the Sea

"An enthralling nautical epic, River Meets the Sea traces the dual timelines of a white-passing Indigenous foster child in 1940s Vancouver and a teenage immigrant in the suburbs of Nanaimo in the 1970s. A natural-born storyteller, Ronny is a left-handed 'alley mutt' without a birth certificate who searches for his mother everywhere - most powerfully, he hears her voice in the surging Stâo: låo River. Born in the middle of the ocean on a merchant ship departing Sri Lanka, Chandra is a Tamil boy with 'skin like a charred eggplant' who finds his haven from the pressure to assimilate by swimming and surfing in the Salish Sea. Moving gracefully between these parallel stories like a wave, the novel traces the seemingly separate lives of these sensitive young men and their everlasting connections to water. When their troubled paths inevitably cross, they form a sacred bond based on the mutual understanding of what it means to be othered, illuminating the interconnectedness of humanity and our innate relationship with the natural world. "-