Welcome Reader,
You have found us at last. You've been looking for a long time, haven't you, searching for Canadian fiction without oppression, without the suffering. All those sensitive coming-of-age tragedies and poetic odes to the blowing wheat of the prairies have left you defeated. You have wandered the landscape of the Canadian novel and you have knelt and wept, traumatized by the weight of these stories. We understand. The Workhorsery is holding its arms out to you, waiting to offer comfort with stories that don't hurt. Non-traumatizing Canadian fiction does exist. No, really, it does. And we want to prove it to you.
The independent corporate freehold of Pitouie is a fleck of rock in the South Pacific. It has no industry, no economy, and no natural resources. What it does have is a volcano, a glossy brochure, and a list of industrial waste producers, whose executives are about to descend on the island's pristine shores to bid for a hole in the ground.
Otis Wilson, associate editor of Waste Insight magazine, is also enroute to Pitouie. He thinks he's going to watch an innocent nation reach for the soap in the prison shower of international commerce. What he's going to find is much stranger and has something to do with events in an Inuit village in the Arctic thirty-five years ago. Sorting it out will be challenging, even without the distraction of the girl.
