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 the country and another federal election looms, four friends convene for a week-long wilderness hunting trip at a secluded hunting facility in northwestern Newfoundland called The Castle, operated by an enigmatic ornithologist, Dr. Judith Muir. A reluctant conscript on the trip, the unnamed narrator of Hides travels out of a guilty sense of obligation, forced to commemorate—in a way he finds morally ghoulish—the death of his best friend’s son, who was killed in a mass shooting in Calgary the year before. The novel traces the emotional ruptures following this violent, untimely death, along with the tensions of old friendships and father-son relationships marred by loss, betrayal, and a pervasive political and environmental disenchantment.
