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THE CANNIBAL SPIRIT
Fiction (Literary Fiction) 306 pages
Penguin Canada - September 2011
British Columbia, Canada, 1900. George Hunt has watched his people dying - from disease, whisky, warfare and despair. With a white father and an Indian mother he is a chieftain and shaman among the Kwagiulth people, but also a museum collector, assisting the famous anthropologist Franz Boas in his work. He has lived in both worlds, but has come to be despised by both. Now his only son is dead and an already fraying world is ripped apart.
Based on a true story, THE CANNIBAL SPIRIT is a powerful novel that inhabits the dark places of a disintegrating world, bringing the voices from that world unforgettably to life. At times brutal, often very moving, it is a novel about a lost way of life and the crisis of identity in the modern era. An astounding debut.
Biography
Harry Whitehead worked for many years in film and TV production. He has masters degrees in creative writing and medical anthropology, and a PhD from Lancaster University. He has had a number of short stories and essays published, and teaches creative writing at the University of Leicester. THE CANNIBAL SPIRIT is his first novel and he is writing a second for Hamish Hamilton Canada.
'George Hunt, the protagonist of British author Harry Whitehead's debut novel, makes quite a first impression...a powerful novel. THE CANNIBAL SPIRIT is a compelling, complex novel, free of caricature and facile responses to its subject matter...Whitehead has created a unique work that immerses the reader in a culture at a crisis point. Unflinching and rigorously unsentimental, THE CANNIBAL SPIRIT is a thought-provoking and impressive read.' -- Robert J. Wiersema, Quill & Quire
'Powerful, ambitious ...The plot, which includes hand-to-hand combat, vivid dreams and seeming magic, guilty secrets galore and death-defying oceanic canoe travel, is fast-paced and full of surprises. The text is ornamented with lyrically beautiful descriptions of the British Columbia coast. ... Whitehead has a keen eye for the contradictions and tumults of his characters' inner lives, and he weaves the voices of several characters into a compelling psychological portrait of a people on the brink of ruin. His characters, first nations, mixed race and European, are all persuasively drawn ...This is a brave and ambitious book that sets out to retrieve lost history and turn it into high literature.' -- Tom Sandborne, Globe and Mail
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