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Three Day Road
By: Joseph Boyden

Set in the wilderness of northern Ontario and the battlefields of Europe, Three Day Road takes readers deep into the horrors–physical, emotional and spiritual–of the Great War.

The story is told through the voices of two Native Canadians: Xavier, who has returned from the war badly wounded and ravaged by his addiction to morphine, and his aunt Niska, who cares for him and tries to restore him.

Xavier had joined up at the urging of his friend Elijah; like many who fought in the Great War, they were certain it would be over quickly. But the war they experienced was far from the thrilling adventure they had imagined. Newly arrived at the Western Front, their native hunting skills impressed their superiors and both men became snipers. They killed many men, but while Xavier from the beginning felt a kind of spiritual revulsion, Elijah revelled in it and tried to notch more kills than any other sniper in the war. His bloodlust completely mastered him and he soon learned to kill with both detached coolness and frenzied violence. Disobeying orders at every turn, he committed atrocities against the enemy, against civilians and even against his fellow soldiers. His addiction to morphine only hastened his moral dissipation.

As Xavier remembers the nightmare of war, he struggles with his own addiction, the loss of his leg and the certainty that he will die after his supply of morphine runs out. But Niska watches over him and “feeds” him healing stories of her past, his own past and of the larger past of their people, the Cree of northern Ontario. Whether she will be able to save him–to bring him back from the brink of death–creates the suspense that drives the narrative to its surprising conclusion.

Inspired in part by real-life World War I Ojibwa hero Francis Pegahmagabow, Three Day Road is a compelling and viscerally powerful exploration of what poet Wilfred Owen described as “the pity of war.”

About the Author:

Joseph Boyden is a Canadian with Irish, Scottish, and Métis roots. Three Day Road has received the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year Award and has also been shortlisted for the Governor General Award for Fiction and published in 10 languages.

He divides his time between Northern Ontario and Louisiana, where he teaches writing at the University of New Orleans.He is the author of Born with a Tooth, a collection of stories that was shortlisted for the Upper Canada Writer’s Craft Award.

His work has appeared in publications such as Potpourri, Cimarron Review, Blue Penny Quarterly, BlackWarrior, and The Panhandler.

(Joseph Boyden photo credit: By Esby (talk) 07:37, 4 June 2010 (UTC) (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)