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 Alberta and another federal election looms, four friends convene for a week-long wilderness hunting trip at a secluded hunting facility called The Castle, located in northwestern Newfoundland and operated by an enigmatic ornithologist, Dr. Judith Muir. The narrator of Hides figures as a reluctant conscript on the trip, travelling out of a guilty sense of loyalty and obligation, forced to commemorate—in a way he finds morally ghoulish—the death of his best friend’s son, who was killed across the country in a mass shooting the year before. The novel’s themes coalesce around the emotional ruptures wrought of a violent, untimely death. The characters struggle to retain a sense of purpose and hope amid a world suffused with familial anguish and guilt, loss, betrayal, and a pervasive political and environmental disenchantment.
As wildfires rage across Alberta and another federal election looms, four friends convene for a week-long wilderness hunting trip at a secluded hunting facility called The Castle, located in northwestern Newfoundland and operated by an enigmatic ornithologist, Dr. Judith Muir. The narrator of Hides figures as a reluctant conscript on the trip, travelling out of a guilty sense of loyalty and obligation, forced to commemorate—in a way he finds morally ghoulish—the death of his best friend’s son, who was killed across the country in a mass shooting the year before. The novel’s themes coalesce around the emotional ruptures wrought of a violent, untimely death. The characters struggle to retain a sense of purpose and hope amid a world suffused with familial anguish and guilt, loss, betrayal, and a pervasive political and environmental disenchantment.
Rod Moody-Corbett is an award-winning writer from Newfoundland. His writing appears in The Drift, the Paris Review Daily, and Fiddlehead, among others. He is the recipient of the 2022 Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Story, a Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters Award for Short Fiction, the University of Calgary’s Kaleidoscope Prize, and the CBC Canada Writes Short Story Prize (People’s Choice Award). He holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Calgary, has presented his work at the Yale Writers’ Conference, and serves a contributing editor for Canadian Notes and Queries.
ISBN: 9781778530241 , 9781778530258
Item Publish Date: 2024 / 06 / 04
Measurements: NIL
Weight: 0.5 kg
Page Count: 248
