Bones of a Giant with Brian Thomas Isaac

Join Massy Books, Penguin Random House, and Brian Thomas Isaac for the launch of “Bones of a Giant” at 7 pm on Monday, June 2nd!

Books will be for sale at the event, including “All the Quiet Places.”

Venue:

The event will be hosted at the Massy Books, at 229 East Georgia Street in Chinatown, Vancouver.

Registration is free or by donation and required for entry.

The bookstore is wheelchair accessible and a gender-neutral washroom is on-site.

Please refrain from wearing scents or heavy perfumes.

Covid Protocols: Masks keep our community safe and are recommended and will be provided at the venue. We ask if you are showing symptoms, that you stay home. Thank you kindly.

About the Book:

Summer, 1968. For the first time since his big brother, Eddie, disappeared two years earlier—either a runaway or dead by his own hand—sixteen-year-old Lewis Toma has shaken off some of his grief. His mother, Grace, and her friend Isabel have gone south to the United States to pack fruit to earn the cash Grace needs to put a bathroom and running water into the three-room shack they share on the reserve, leaving Lewis to spend the summer with his cousins, his Uncle Ned and his Aunt Jean in the new house they’ve built on their farm along the Salmon River. Their warm family life is almost enough to counter the pressures he feels as a boy trying to become a man in a place where responsible adult men like his uncle are largely absent, broken by residential school and racism. Everywhere he looks, women are left to carry the load, sometimes with kindness, but often with the bitterness, anger and ferocity of his own mother, who kicked Lewis’s lowlife father, Jimmy, to the curb long ago.

Lewis has vowed never to be like his father—but an encounter with a predatory older woman tests him and he suffers the consequences. Worse, his dad is back in town and scheming on how to use the Indian Act to steal the land Lewis and his mom have been living on. And then, at summer’s end, more shocking revelations shake the family, unleashing a deadly force of anger and frustration.

With so many traps laid around him, how will Lewis find a path to a different future?

About the Author:

Brian Thomas Isaac was born in 1950 on the Okanagan Indian Reserve, near Vernon, British Columbia. After completing grade eight, he found work in the Alberta oil fields and in construction, eventually retiring as a bricklayer. He came to writing late in life. In 2022, his bestselling debut, All the Quiet Places, won an Indigenous Voices Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and CBC’s Canada Reads. He lives with his wife in West Kelowna, BC.