River Meets the Sea: A Novel

Summary

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:lo 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.