The Back of the Turtle

Winner of the 2014 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction!

This is Thomas King’s first literary novel in 15 years and follows on the success of the award-winning and bestselling The Inconvenient Indian and his beloved Green Grass, Running Water and Truth and Bright Water, both of which continue to be taught in Canadian schools and universities. Green Grass, Running Water is widely considered a contemporary Canadian classic.

In The Back of the Turtle, Gabriel returns to Smoke River, the reserve where his mother grew up and to which she returned with Gabriel’s sister. The reserve is deserted after an environmental disaster killed the population, including Gabriel’s family, and the wildlife. Gabriel, a brilliant scientist working for Domidion, created GreenSweep, and indirectly led to the crisis. Now he has come to see the damage and to kill himself in the sea. But as he prepares to let the water take him, he sees a young girl in the waves. Plunging in, he saves her, and soon is saving others. Who are these people with their long black hair and almond eyes who have fallen from the sky?

Filled with brilliant characters, trademark wit, wordplay and a thorough knowledge of native myth and story-telling, this novel is a masterpiece by one of our most important writers.

THOMAS KING is an award-winning writer whose fiction includes Green Grass, Running Water; Truth and Bright Water and The Back of the Turtle, which won the Governor General’s Literary Award. His non-fiction book The Truth About Stories won the Trillium Book Award, while The Inconvenient Indian won the B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction and the RBC Taylor Prize. A member of the Order of Canada and the recipient of an award from the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation, Thomas King has taught at the University of Lethbridge and was chair of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota before moving to the University of Guelph, where he taught until he retired. He lives in Guelph with his partner, Helen Hoy. Cold Skies is the third novel in Thomas King’s DreadfulWater series.