Hidden among the glacial hills and lakes of the Canadian Shield lies Sugarmilk Falls, a close-knit community with the worst of secrets. Everyone, including the aging priest and the town’s sole policeman, who have their own reasons for concealing the facts, remembers a different version of what really happened there over twenty years ago.

But secrets cannot stay buried forever. As the thick snow of a winter’s night sets in, the inhabitants gather together, induced by a questioning stranger to talk openly for the first time about the sinister events of the past. Some think that it all began when Grand’mère Osweken, an Ojibwa shaman, lost the maple forests on a gamble during a game of craps. Others contend it goes further back, to the arrival of the schoolteacher Marina Grochowska, a newcomer with a tightly guarded past. Or perhaps it really started years before that when the woodsman Zack Guillem discovered a curious powdery coating over an area of foliage in the bush.

Beautifully crafted and darkly compelling, this is a remarkable debut that captures the spirit and repression of a blighted community as it slowly turns in on itself. Sugarmilk Falls has earned comparisons with David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, as it similarly takes readers deep inside a community riven by prejudice and by the secrets of the past.