River Meets the Sea : A Novel

A spellbinding, spirited tale of two men exploring masculinity, race, and belonging in a desperate search to feel at home in their own skins.

An enthralling epic, River Meets the Sea traces the dual timelines of a white-passing Indigenous foster child in 1940s Vancouver and a teenage immigrant in the suburbs of Nanaimo in the 1970s. 

A natural-born storyteller, Ronny is a left-handed alley mutt without a birth certificate who hears his mother's voice in the surging Stó:lō River. Born in the middle of the ocean on a merchant ship departing Sri Lanka, Chandra is a Tamil boy with skin like a charred eggplant who finds solace swimming and surfing in the Salish Sea. 

Moving gracefully between parallel stories like a wave, this spellbinding novel traces the seemingly separate lives of two spirited, sensitive young men and their everlasting connections to water. Their troubled paths inevitably cross, and they form a sacred bond based on the mutual understanding of what it means to be othered, illuminating the interconnectedness of humanity and our innate relationship with the natural world.

RACHAEL MOORTHY is a writer of mixed heritage who still hasn’t figured out how to answer the question “Where are you from?” She is passionate about telling stories from the perspectives of people who, like her, have complex and tangled roots (namely, melanated, diasporic, and displaced Indigenous identities). She hopes to carve out a community of belonging for the aporia caught in the liminal aftermath of colonialism, whose ancestral and cultural connections have been fractured because of foster care, adoption, and genocide. She believes she is best able to remain humble as an advocate in the dialogue surrounding Indigenous sovereignty by standing firm in her fluidity as a multi-ethnic person raised in a Eurocentric, assimilated context. Rachael has a bachelor’s of writing from the University of Victoria and is pursuing a master’s in multi/interlingual literary studies at the University of Basel. She was shortlisted for the 2020 Far Horizons Award for Poetry, and her fiction has appeared in publications such as PRISM international, SAD Magazine, and Revue Zinc. Born in Matsqui, British Columbia, she lives in Switzerland.