A spellbinding, spirited tale of two men exploring masculinity, race,
and belonging in a desperate search to feel at home in their own
skins.
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 Stó lō 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.
