THREE DAY ROAD. (J.Boyden)

These are the walking archetypes that populate Boyden’s first novel, Three Day Road, a book whose philosophical underpinnings—the clash between spiritual Natives and amoral wemistikoshiw; the gulf between the everyday dangers of nature and the twisted snares of war—are equally familiar and well-used. Yet there’s hardly a paragraph here that doesn’t deliver a fresh jolt of surprise and hardly an image that doesn’t flare up into a bright mental picture.