From a breathtakingly talented new writer: a beautifully written, gripping novel that weaves storytelling magic, life, love, and tragedy into the beauty of the Canadian landscape.

Deloume Road takes us into a hot August month on Vancouver Island during the first Gulf War, to a small rural community where the children’s lives play out unchangingly in the woods and secret places—until they discover an object from the past that will come to haunt them all. Slowly we discover how intertwined are the lives of recent comers with long established neighbours: a Ukrainian butcher who yearns for his wife and small son left behind—and learns something disturbing; a widowed Korean girl who fears for the life of the baby she is carrying; a Native artist whose pilot son has crashed in the wilderness. And behind them all, the shadow of Gerard Deloume, whose suicide in 1899 set off a sequence of events that erupt a century later with violent, tragic consequences.

Matthew Hooton, with lovely skill, and an assured voice, creates an indelible sense of a small community along a country road and the ties that bind us, celebrating the differences and connections between the Korean language and English, between losing a loved one to war and pulling the trigger, about summer and the first rain.

Length: 320 pp
Setting: Vancouver Island, Canada
Period: 1990s




Canadian rights, Knopf Canada


For all other rights contact Greene & Heaton.

Photocredit: Jo Hurd

Matthew Hooton grew up on Vancouver Island and obtained a BA in Writing from the University of Victoria. He went on to publish non-fiction in several Canadian newspapers and magazines, before moving to England and completing an MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, where Deloume Road was unanimously awarded the inaugural Greene & Heaton Prize for the best novel to emerge from the Bath Spa MA in Creative Writing. He has read ?ction at the Bath Literature Festival, and has worked as an editor and teacher in several cities in South Korea. He now lives with his wife in Victoria, British Columbia.