Bonanza: A Story of the Outside

Rupe Petrie has known only the silence of the Canadian northwest, raised in isolation near the Yellow Sands River by a father who speaks little and warns less. When his father dies under mysterious circumstances, leaving behind only cryptic warnings and fragments of a stolen map, Rupe is thrust into a world he has never known, one where gold turns men into ghosts and trust is a currency more dangerous than cash. Teaming with the loyal MacCaskill and his fierce companion Akshelah, a Cree woman who understands the wilderness in ways Rupe is only beginning to learn, he pursues the truth into frontier towns teeming with danger, from the sinister Redpath to his brutal associate Olaffson. The wilderness that once felt like home becomes both sanctuary and battlefield as Rupe discovers that the Outside is not a place but a test of who he truly is. Trevena writes with the raw poetry of earth and blood, his prose as untamed as the landscape itself, in a novel that asks what remains of a boy when everything familiar is stripped away.