As satisfying as Mary Lawson’s Crow Lake and as emotionally resonant as Carol Shields’ Unless, Donna Milner’s After River is a novel not just for reading but for living in, spellbinding in its impeccable plotting, achingly human characters and note-perfect prose. This is also a work that beautifully renders time and place, as an isolated and harsh Canadian geography is wracked by a seismic shift in the moral and social landscape of the late 60s.
    Before the wise and gentle River came, 15-year-old Natalie Ward believed her world was perfect: her family would always be together, living and working on their small dairy farm carved out in a mountain valley deep in the Cascades of British Columbia. Natalie would always be “my girl” to Boyer, her gifted older brother, and the pride of Nettie, her beautiful, charismatic mother. After River, things were changed, which Nettie blamed on the encroaching world: the new highway that would connect the town to the Trans-Canada, the closeness of an America engulfed in Vietnam and violence. But it was River, the young American draft dodger who became the Ward’s hired hand, who changed everything one summer.
    Thirty-five years later, the family is still shattered in ways that no one could ever have foretold. And now, as her mother lies dying, Natalie must return to the home she has spent most of her life running from, as the family’s dark secrets and betrayals threaten to scar a new generation.

Donna Milner is the author After River, an internationally acclaimed novel, published in twelve countries and translated into eight languages. Her second novel, The Promise of Rain, was a Globe and Mail top 100 pick for 2010.Born Donna Jones in Victoria, British Columbia, Donna spent her childhood in Vancouver. As an adult she relocated to the town of Rossland in the heart of BC’s West Kootenay, and ten years later moved to the central interior city of Williams Lake. She now lives in an off-the-grid, eco-friendly lakeside home in the Cariboo woods with her husband, Tom, and their dog, Beau. She is currently working on her fourth novel.

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