Seventeen year-old Ocean Janak has grown up the privileged daughter of Blake, a geologist turned Calgary oil sands executive. When she falls for Rory McAllister, a Calgary bike courier who secretly scans many of the oil contracts he’s paid to deliver, she finds a lover and a comrade-in-green-arms. Alarmed by the historical Project Cauldron—the private (and patented!) American proposal to liquify the oil in Alberta’s tar sands with nuclear bombs—the increasingly militant green lovers go north to Fort McMurray with the plan of exploding the containment wall of an oilsands tailings pond dam to flood the entire region in toxins and bring the industry to a halt. The environmental racism that finds northern Canadian First Nations poisoned is also resented by Luke Simon, a Cree sniper whose bile-duct cancer brought him home prematurely from the war in Afghanistan. He, too, has a plan to stop the sands.
Darryl Whetter is a writer, editor and the inaugural director of the first taught creative writing MA in Singapore and Southeast Asia.
In 2003, his first book of fiction was named to The Globe and Mail‘s Top 100 Books of 2003. That book, the story collection A Sharp Tooth in the Fur, received rave reviews from coast to coast. His debut novel, A Bicycle Odyssey, rolled out in 2008. Look for The Push & the Pull wherever fine books are sold.
On Earth Day 2012, he released Origins, a book of poems devoted to evolution, energy and extinction as they have been, can be and/or should be viewed at Joggins, Nova Scotia. His latest novel, Keeping Things Whole, is a multi-generational smuggling epic of love and death.
He has published nearly 100 book reviews for papers such as The Toronto Star, The National Post, The Vancouver Sun, The Globe and Mail, The Montreal Gazette and Detroit’s Metro Times.
He has appeared at writing festivals and/or universities in Bali, Malaysia, Iceland, Australia, Sweden, Wales, Canada, Singapore and the US.
He wrote the books column for THIS Magazine and was Reviews Editor for the uber-cool Numéro Cinq.
