Lower Canada, 1804.
Arthur Stanton, lacking direction in his life and desperately seeking the approval of his father, wanders the streets of Montreal filled with daydreams of exotic
lands and adventures inspired by novels and traveller's tales. On a sudden whim he decides to sign up as a clerk in the fur trade and is sent on a mission to recover a cache of furs obtained from a secret beaver in El Dorado. Accompanied by a down-at-heel band of voyageurs, led by a disgraced and drunken trader, he embarks on a journey by birchbark canoe into the northern wilderness.
Paddling from Lachine to Lake Superior, and then across the unresolved border between Canada and the United States, Arthur's travels will take him into a series of baffling new worlds, where he will prove himself to be hapless in trade, hopeless in love, and terrified of the landscapes and peoples that surround him. Stumbling from one mishap into another, he will at last fall into disaster, seemingly betray his friends and companions, and have to begin a quest to set things right.
Set amongst the starkly beautiful landscapes of the upper great lakes during an era of blurred and shifting boundaries between nations and cultures, where nothing is certain and misapprehensions can be fatal, Arthur's journey becomes a tragicomic tale of love, loss and redemption.

"you know what you’re getting with a Tristan Hughes novel, and what you’re getting is Good... The research is meticulous and judiciously applied, as is the evocation of milieu and environment" – Niall Griffiths, Nation. Cymru

Tristan Hughes was born in Atikokan in northern Ontario and brought up on the Welsh island of Ynys Mon. He is the author of four novels,
Send My Cold Bones Home, Revenant, Eye Lake and Hummingbird - which won the Edward Stanford Award for Fiction with a Sense of Place and the Wales Book of Year People's Choice Award - as well as a collection of linked short stories, The Tower. His short fiction has appeared in various journals, including Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and New Welsh Review. He is a winner of the Rhys Davies short story prize and an O. Henry Award.