Afterlands, page 38
I must thank my terrific editors—Michael Schellenberg and Louise Dennys at Knopf Canada—for their various astute interventions. I’m also very grateful to Anton Mueller at Houghton Mifflin and Simon Prosser at Hamish Hamilton. Likewise my agent, Anne McDermid, as well as her associates, Jane Warren and Rebecca Weinfeld—thank you so much for your help.
I’m grateful to Douglas Glover for choosing an excerpt from this book (pages 31–38) for Best Canadian Stories 2004. Also to Sheila Nickerson, whose carefully researched and moving biography Midnight to the North will interest any readers who wish to know more about Tukulito/Hannah. Bruce Henderson’s Fatal North was also helpful, in part by directing me to material contained among the Captain George E. Tyson Papers, at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland.
I’d also like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts; the Ontario Arts Council; the Concordia University English department, which gave me a writer-in-residence position during the 2002–03 school year; Master John Fraser and Massey College, for doing the same for me in the winter of 2004; the Hawthornden Foundation, for a three-week stay at Hawthornden in 2003; and the Pierre Berton House Foundation, whom I thank for a brief but inspiring residency in Dawson City in 2001.
And of course, my first reader, Mary Huggard.
This book is for the Scalas.
STEVEN HEIGHTON’S first novel was the critically acclaimed bestseller The Shadow Boxer, which went on to be published in five countries. He has written two short story collections, Flight Paths of the Emperor and On earth as it is, along with four poetry collections, including The Address Book, The Ecstasy of Skeptics, and Stalin’s Carnival. His work has been translated into a number of languages, has been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Trillium Award, the Journey Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and Britain’s WH Smith Award, and has received the Air Canada Prize, Gold Medals for fiction and for poetry in the National Magazine Awards, the Gerald Lampert Award, and the Petra Kenney Prize. Afterlands has been published in the United States, Britain, Australia, Germany, and the Netherlands. Steven Heighton lives in Kingston, Ontario.
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2006
Copyright © 2005 Steven Heighton
Map © 2005 Steven Heighton
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2006. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2005. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.
www.randomhouse.ca
Afterlands is a work of fiction. Although partially based on actual events, real people, and a published book—George E. Tyson’s Arctic Experiences (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1874; New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002)—the novel is an imaginative recreation of these sources and is not intended to be historically accurate.
The engravings reproduced in this book, from Arctic Experiences, are by J. O. Davidson (1853–1894).
Epigraph on page 43 copyright © Judith Thurman.
Used with the author’s permission.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Heighton, Steven
Afterlands : a novel / Steven Heighton.
eISBN: 978-0-307-36948-2
I. Title.
PS8565.E451A65 2006 C813.’54 C2006–902081–7
v3.0
Steven Heighton, Afterlands
