The Orenda: Winner of the Libris Award for Best Fiction

by JosephBoyden (Author), JosephBoyden (Author)

New
Paperback
2014
$14.23

1640s, The New World In the remote winter landscape a brutal massacre and the kidnapping of a young Iroquois girl violently re-ignites a deep rift between two tribes. The girl's captor, Bird, is one of the Huron Nation's great warriors and statesmen. Years have passed since the murder of his family, and yet they are never far from his mind. In the girl, Snow Falls, he recognizes the ghost of his lost daughter, but as he fights for her heart and allegiance, small battles erupt into bigger wars as both tribes face a new, more dangerous threat from afar. Travelling with the Huron is Christophe, a charismatic missionary who has found his calling among the tribe and devotes himself to learning and understanding their customs and language. An emissary from distant lands, he brings much more than his faith to this new world, with its natural beauty and riches. As these three souls dance with each other through intricately woven acts of duplicity, their social, political and spiritual worlds collide - and a new nation rises from a world in flux.

Synopsis

1640s, The New World In the remote winter landscape a brutal massacre and the kidnapping of a young Iroquois girl violently re-ignites a deep rift between two tribes. The girl's captor, Bird, is one of the Huron Nation's great warriors and statesmen. Years have passed since the murder of his family, and yet they are never far from his mind. In the girl, Snow Falls, he recognizes the ghost of his lost daughter, but as he fights for her heart and allegiance, small battles erupt into bigger wars as both tribes face a new, more dangerous threat from afar. Travelling with the Huron is Christophe, a charismatic missionary who has found his calling among the tribe and devotes himself to learning and understanding their customs and language. An emissary from distant lands, he brings much more than his faith to this new world, with its natural beauty and riches. As these three souls dance with each other through intricately woven acts of duplicity, their social, political and spiritual worlds collide - and a new nation rises from a world in flux.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 496
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 03 Apr 2014
ISBN 10: 1780744404
ISBN 13: 9781780744407
Prizes: Shortlisted for Governor General's Literary Awards: English Fiction Category 2013. Long-listed for Scotiabank Giller Prize 2013.

Media Reviews

`A fascinating study of blood-splattered resistance to the inevitable civilisation which will abrogate the lives of the Huron and their beautiful wilderness forever.' * The Tablet *
`Even-handed and morally complex, melodramatic and keenly felt, it is historical fiction at its best' * Sunday Telegraph *
`Every time I opened the pages of The Orenda it was like stepping into another world, so vastly different to my own, but so wonderfully rich and evocative that I would feel a sense of dislocation whenever I closed the book and went about my normal life. It is by far the best novel I've read all year.' -- Best books of 2013 * We Love This Book *
`A tour-de-force... Boyden's skill in never allowing the point of view of one of his protagonists to become more seductive than the others is remarkable... It is transparent that Boyden has done his historical homework...The author is too good, however, to make that anything but a subtext... Those layers are there to be savoured... to be secondary to the pursuit of a captivating plot.' * The Herald *
`Brutal, tragic [and] viscerally realistic... What makes it extraordinary and, at times, hard to read or bear, is the way Boyden pulls no punches in conjuring up the horrors of tribal warfare without compromising the enveloping tragedy of the decimation of the Hurons and their way of life... It does not compromise the importance of this serious book, leaving the reader stunned and saddened.' 4 out of 5 stars. * The Metro *
'One of the most powerful novels I've ever read.' -- Steven Galloway, author of The Cellist of Sarajevo
'Joseph Boyden writes with muscle and magic in impossible balance... you will read no better book this year.' -- Andrew Davidson, author of The Gargoyle

Author Bio

Joseph Boyden's first novel, Three Day Road, was selected for the Today Show Book Club, and it won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award, as well as numerous others. His second novel, Through Black Spruce, was awarded the Scotiabank Giller Prize and named the Canadian Booksellers Association Book of the Year; it also earned him the CBA's Author of the Year Award. Boyden, of Ojibwe, Irish, and Scottish roots, is a member of the Creative Writing faculty at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He divides his time between Northern Ontario and Louisiana.