White River Crossing

McGuire follows up The Abstainer with a staggering portrait of the schemers and villains who populate Prince of Wales’s Fort, a barren outpost of the Hudson Bay Company in what is now northern Manitoba. In 1766, an unreliable fur trader offers a rock with a sliver of gold running through it to company manager Magnus Norton, suggesting that more can be found in the barren Esquimaux lands farther north. Norton enlists his vicious, self-serving deputy, John Shaw, to lead a small party on a secret mission to find the gold deposits and bring enough home to make them all rich. The introspective and melancholy seaman Tom Hearn joins the party, along with Norton’s naive nephew Abel Walker; their Dene guide, Datsanthi; his troubled son, Nabayah; and their wives Pawpitch and Keasik. Much of the expedition, which goes violently and tragically awry—Keasik is impregnated by Shaw, who loses an arm in a wolf attack—is shown from Hearn’s perspective. The frigid winter conditions and the gut-wrenching sexual and racial violence perpetrated by Shaw—as savage as any villain in recent literary memory—are brought to vivid life by the author’s keen talent for storytelling and willingness to depict the depths of human cruelty. Though some expedition members make it back alive to tell the tale, the story’s ending is a shock, as McGuire explores in the final twist how hope and honor can be liabilities in a world of temptation, treachery, and retribution. It’s a stunner. Agent: Denise Shannon, Denise Shannon Literary. (Feb.)