Hides is a novel of family and politics that distinguishes itself through its careful intermingling of seriousness and comedy, and its surreal but eerily plausible setting.
As wildfires rage across the country and another federal election looms, four friends convene for a week-long wilderness hunting trip at a secluded hunting facility in northwestern Newfoundland called The Castle, operated by an enigmatic ornithologist, Dr. Judith Muir. A reluctant conscript on the trip, the unnamed narrator of Hides travels out of a guilty sense of obligation, forced to commemorate—in a way he finds morally ghoulish—the death of his best friend’s son, who was killed in a mass shooting in Calgary the year before. The novel traces the emotional ruptures following this violent, untimely death, along with the tensions of old friendships and father-son relationships marred by loss, betrayal, and a pervasive political and environmental disenchantment.
A Globe and Mail 2024 Summer Reads pick:
"Decorous elegance characterizes the prose in this novel about a junior English professor from Calgary who, against the backdrop of a looming federal election and raging wildfires, reluctantly overcomes cognitive dissonance to attend a hunting weekend in Newfoundland, organized to commemorate the mass-shooting death of his best friend’s son."
Advance Praise for Hides:
"Hides is raucous, tender, sly, and as rich and deep as a forest. Helmed by an unforgettable protagonist who knows so much (while hilariously understanding so little), I was gripped from the first page by the unexpected gentleness in this artful and funny novel, and moved by its unexpected turns on grief, and the bonds of family and friendship. An unforgettable work by a superb writer."
Suzette Mayr
author of Giller Prize-winning The Sleeping Car Porter
“Guns and grief haunt this debut novel, linking a shooting on a Calgary train and a hunting trip for caribou at a strange castle in Newfoundland. The book is about grief and loss, yet is oddly funny, the razor-sharp prose like some outport lovechild of DeLillo and Nabokov. Hides is a little creepy and very impressive.”
Mark Anthony Jarman
author of Burn Man: Selected Stories
"On the edge of a failing world, four characters come together to see what remains, and what can be salvaged. Rod Moody-Corbett has written a book that seems to simultaneously inhabit our present and our future. The writing in Hides seethes and crackles with energy—tough, heartfelt, funny, and sarcastic in all the necessary places."
Tamas Dobozy
author of Siege 13 and Stazio
