An enthralling nautical epic, River Meets the Sea traces the dual timelines of a white-passing Indigenous foster child in 1940s Vancouver and a teenage immigrant in the suburbs of Nanaimo in the 1970s.

A natural-born storyteller, Ronny is a left-handed "alley mutt" without a birth certificate who searches for his mother everywhere — most powerfully, he hears her voice in the surging Stó:lō River. Born in the middle of the ocean on a merchant ship departing Sri Lanka, Chandra is a Tamil boy with "skin like a charred eggplant" who finds his haven from the pressure to assimilate by swimming and surfing in the Salish Sea.

Moving gracefully between these parallel stories like a wave, the novel traces the seemingly separate lives of these sensitive young men and their everlasting connections to water. When their troubled paths inevitably cross, they form a sacred bond based on the mutual understanding of what it means to be othered, illuminating the interconnectedness of humanity and our innate relationship with the natural world. (From House of Anansi Press)

Rachael Moorthy is a British Columbia-born writer living in Switzerland. She was shortlisted for the 2020 Far Horizons Award for Poetry.