Child of the Seal Clan (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781836155447)

This is a story about a young boy striving to come to terms with the unexplained death of his mother. It is set in two distinct realities: 1960s England, where Keith lives with his troubled father, and the Indigenous Canada of the 1860s, which Keith is learning about in class.

The setting opens in Southern England, and the year is 1963. Grieving his mother, eight-year-old Keith retreats into an imaginary world, fuelled by his school lessons about Amerindian culture and colonial history, to find her, resurrect her, and bring his parents back together. His father, with whom he has a strained relationship, is a government nuclear scientist engaged in the nuclear arms race of the Cold War. A strict and severe man, he is nevertheless also grieving, and is becoming increasingly worried about his son's withdrawal.

Weaving reality into his make-believe world, Keith finds his mother in a new guise. She is the breathtakingly beautiful woman Okwana from the Seal clan in British Columbia of the 1860s. His father is the colourful yet war-mongering Thunderbird Akulam. Keith himself becomes their son, Koto. The local trickster is no other that the gang leader in Keith's class at school. The novel thus shifts focus to Canada in the 1860s, unfolding against the backdrop of the region's spectacular scenery.

Keith, as Koto, witnesses domestic violence in the Indigenous home, gradually recognising parallels to conflicts between his parents back in England. Despite his mother's apparent vulnerability and aloofness, he discovers in this new world that she is a strong and defiant woman who challenges his father, then runs away with a lover. The lover is a spirit man from the Arctic called Fulmar. Fulmar is no other than his mother's clandestine lover Keith only once saw in the real world without understanding the relationship. By immersing himself in this make-believe realm, Keith discovers the reality behind his parents' fraught marriage, gains insight into their personalities, and witnesses the societal and political events that mould his father's behaviour. His mother's closest friend, his father's sister and brother, along with the boys at school are all paralleled with Indigenous characters who partake in the unravelling of the colourful and dynamic imagined world he, as Koto, is living in. Vicious tribal raids and power struggles mirror the Cold War in which his father is involved. Riotous potlaches of snot-throwing masked dancers, gluttonous cream-eating contests, flaming pyres, and shaman seances, many in the growing presence of white colonial officials and all of which Keith has conjured up, captivate us. We partake with Keith in the unravelling of his parents' lives until he at last understands the reason for his mother's death, and for his father's pent-up anger. Armed with this understanding, he finally confronts his mother's ex-lover and blames him for his mother's demise.

Now that Keith understands his parents' struggles, the reasons behind his mother's death, and his father's suppressed emotions, he can leave his imagined world and accept reality, reconcile with this father, and find inner peace.