Joan Thomas's novel Wild Hope is a page-turning mystery about wealth, water and art — read an excerpt now
Wild Hope will be available on Sept. 19, 2023
Wild Hope is the latest book by Governor General's Literary Award-winning author Joan Thomas.
The novel follows Isla and Jake, a couple who are slowly drifting apart. Isla's farm-to-table restaurant is failing and visual artist Jake is haunted by his late father's legacy in the oil and gas industry.
Jake's childhood friend-turned-enemy Reg Bevaqua is a local bottled-water baron and harbours a seething resentment toward Jake. Reg is a demanding regular at Isla's restaurant and Jake is keeping a close eye on him. When Jake disappears after a winter camping trip all signs point to Reg and his magnificent Georgian Bay property — and Isla is determined to get to the bottom of it.
Thomas is the author of four previous novels. Her first novel, Reading by Lightning, won the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book (Canada and the Caribbean) and the Amazon First Novel Award. Her novel Five Wives won the 2019 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction. Her novel The Opening Sky was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction in 2014 and was awarded the Engel/Findley Award by the Writers Trust of Canada.
Wild Hope will be available on Sept. 19, 2023. You can read an excerpt below.
One
Reg Bevaqua stands on a beach on Georgian Bay with a white drone at his feet. He's fiddling with the control sticks, explaining them to his son and heir. The kid is seven, how could he possibly fly a drone? But Reg is an expert, and he can't resist. I can't see Reg's wife — she must be sitting on a rock at the base of the cliff — but there's their little girl, wandering across the sand in a pink and purple swimsuit.
I watch as the drone lifts itself out of Reg's hands. It gains altitude fast, heading straight for me, nimble as a UFO.
She finds a spot she likes and squats and sets to work, tenderly burying her Barbies in the sand. The dog noses after her, a hound of some sort. We're on a beautiful stretch of shore on the west side of the bay, very near the spot where my
boyfriend Jake's family used to have a cabin. Shapely brown rocks. Terns with orange bills. Sprinkles of light on aquamarine water. A yacht is anchored a few metres out, admiring its reflection in the still lake.
The Bevaquas came by water, but I climbed the rocky trail along the shoreline, foraging for signs of Jake. Now I'm crouched on the cliff above the Bevaquas, binoculars dangling around my neck. I watch as the drone lifts itself out of Reg's hands. It gains altitude fast, heading straight for me, nimble as a UFO.
A chipmunk chitters a warning, and it occurs to me that Reg might be filming. But no worries, little William is at the controls, and just as the thing reaches the height of the cliff, it tilts and veers drunkenly toward the sand. Cries ring out. I lean forward to see. The drone has crashed in driftwood and rocks. Poor William — his shrill voice is full of tears.
Reg picks up his toy, frowning over it. At this point in a film, the watcher on the cliff would lift binoculars to their eyes, and that's what I do, I pull the subject of my surveillance into focus. His ear, ordinary, neat. His jaw, clamped in irritation. His temple, the bony crypt where all his vile ideas are hatched. I close in on his quill-like hair, his resolute hairline. Three or four years ago, when I met him, he was a mere multi-millionaire trying to take his company public, and I swear he was
balding at the time. But when you get rich enough, your hair grows back out of sheer respect, right?
Reg picks up his toy, frowning over it. At this point in a film, the watcher on the cliff would lift binoculars to their eyes, and that's what I do, I pull the subject of my surveillance into focus.
I lower the binoculars. The night before, Reg's wife, Eve, assured me they were totally committed to the search.
"We're going to spend the day on the Sequana, but we'll keep our eyes open for anything out of the ordinary," she said, tucking a sleeve of rice crackers into the picnic basket I had packed for them — but in fact, nobody's searching for Jake except me.
They're not even pretending. I don't know what this means, but it feels sinister, and panic rises in my chest. I inch away
from the cliff, avoiding a scattering of deer turds, and lie back on pine needles and moss. Why are you doing this, Jake, I cry silently, like he's hiding from me on purpose. Near me, a bird starts up, an uninspired little song, like a gate swinging back and forth on rusty hinges.
I close my eyes against the sky, a perfect sky, and sling up an elbow to deepen the darkness. I've been sucked into something I don't want to be any part of. That's how it feels — like my ordinary life has morphed into a crime drama with its crude apparatus of suspects and motives and weapons and clues.
Not at all the story I had in mind for myself, but the universe insists. Here, it says. Right here. I lift my arm and turn my head against the moss and I see it. A shell casing. A bright brass shell casing, nestled in ground cedar two feet from my nose.
*
Rewind, go back a few weeks, to a Saturday in April when I took a train into Toronto. It was Easter weekend, to be exact. Jake and I were living in Adlington, a small town an hour northwest, where I was part-owner of a farm-to-table restaurant called The Grange. Not yet open for the season and probably closed for good. Jake had an art show in Toronto that night (not a major show, just a remount at a new artists' centre called The Ark), and I assumed we'd take the train in
together.
But around noon, a text from Jake's agent landed on my phone. I only hope all the bridges he's burning are helping to light his way.
Adapted and excerpted from Wild Hope by Joan Thomas, published by Harper Perennial. Copyright © 2023 Joan Thomas. Reprinted courtesy of Harper Perennial. All rights reserved.
