The Tent Peg
Aritha van Herk
Fiction / Literary
224 pages • 5 1/2 x 8"
ISBN 0-88995-312-0 paper • CDN 6.95 • USA 6.95

In The Tent Peg, award–winning novelist Aritha van Herk uses her unerring perception and impressive literary skill to capture the mystical mood of the Arctic and the people who are drawn to it. In this the intriguing story, a young woman who disguises herself as a man to work in a uranium prospecting camp deep in the Yukon mountains. J.L. is on the run from an empty heart and is desperate for solitude. Yet solitude eludes her from the moment she hangs up her pots and pans in the cook tent, and the men in the camp begin to drift toward her, drawn by her silence. These men are drifters, romantics and outcasts—men who have come to the North in search of answers for questions they can’t define.

Reviews
"The inevitable confrontations in this memorable novel leave no one unchanged."
–Library Journal

"Unusual, skilled fiction. . . . Van Herk successfully manipulates an unusual narrative."
–Booklist

"Written with care, sensitivity and considerable style."
–Publisher's Weekly

"Aritha van Herk's creation of a mystical world infiltrated by reality captures little blue moments of intensity and truth that can hurt."
–Dallas Times–Herald