Joseph Boyden · 2013 · overland

Joseph Boyden's 2013 novel, told in three voices. A Wendat war leader takes a Haudenosaunee girl captive to replace the daughter he lost, and carries a Jesuit north with them. Over the following years the mission, the fur trade, disease and a war between confederacies close on Huronia together, and everything the three of them believe is destroyed by the others.

1. 1
   Quebec

   At the French settlement on the St Lawrence the Jesuits argue for missions among the Wendat, and the traders for furs - and Christophe, the priest they call Crow, is handed over to a war party heading upriver for the winter.

2. 2
   The Ottawa River

   The journey inland is weeks of canoe and portage up the Ottawa, hauling loads round white water and hunted by raiding parties - with the captive girl Snow Falls, taken in the killing of her family, carried along.

3. 3
   Wendake

   In the Wendat country by the great bay, the longhouses hold thousands and the corn fields run for miles - a settled, ordered world that the priest reads as darkness and that is, at this moment, about to end.

4. 4
   Sainte-Marie

   At the mission of Sainte-Marie the two ways of seeing cannot be reconciled, and smallpox and the Haudenosaunee arrive together - and the war that follows erases a nation from the map within a few seasons.