Boundary Country

The stories collected in Boundary Country—poet Thomas Wayman's first book of fiction—slide effortlessly across time and place. Some offer an insider's guide to the people who live in British Columbia's distinctive Kootenay mountain region. Others take as their starting point the family sagas of European immigrants to Toronto during the 1930s or the lives of contemporary working folk in Vancouver. Another turns on an incident during the American Civil War. Yet all the tales, which first appeared in such journals as The Hudson Review, The Ontario Review, and Descant, are set in the borderlands of human experience—the precise moments at which history becomes memory, desire is transformed into belief, and some locale or condition alters and we sense in the change a boundary. Wayman captures the voices of his characters in perfect pitch, their personalities echoing their geography, their substance steeped in authenticity, and their collective truth reminding us that the only true wilderness that remains is which ourselves.