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.
