Kanata

From the author of Canada: A People’s History comes an epic story about the invention of our nation.

In 1759 in Quebec, the battle for a continent took place between British forces commanded by a desperate, suicidal general and French forces commanded by a Marquis who was desperate to leave Quebec. The battle lasted less than thirty minutes. The continent was won, but the prize was still largely an abstraction. Two million square miles of the West were unmapped and unexplored.

David Thompson, a Welshman who came to the New World at the age of fifteen, became its greatest cartographer. He walked or paddled 80,000 miles and mapped 1.9 million square miles, cataloguing flora and fauna as well as the language and customs of Native peoples. But although he’d been described as the greatest land geographer who ever lived, he died impoverished and virtually unknown.

Following the lives of Thompson’s illegitimate son and his descendants, Kanata takes readers on a fictionalized, multigenerational journey through millennia and across a continent to examine the stories, myths, and legends of those who formed the country and were formed by it.