Giller Prize winner Through Black Spruce is the kind of book you don’t think about or try to analyze while you are reading, because the world its author has created is so complete it devours you. Its landscape inhabits you. The voices of its characters leap from the page — you’re not reading their words, you are hearing them speak.

“When there was no Pepsi left for my rye whisky, nieces, there was always ginger ale. No ginger ale? Then I had river water. River water’s light like something between those two. And brown Moose River water’s cold. Cold like living between two colours. Like living in this town. When the whisky was Crown Royal, then brown Moose River water was a fine, fine mix.”

This book is the second of what Boyden conceived from the start as a multi-generational trilogy based on the Bird family of Moose Factory and Moosonee. His first novel, Three Day Road — published in 2005 — appears in 10 languages, and has sold over 100,000 copies. It won numerous prizes and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for fiction.

While Three Day Road was based on the experiences of two young Cree warriors from northern Ontario who fought in the European trenches of the First World War, Through Black Spruce is a contemporary thriller, set amongst the contrasting wildernesses of the James Bay region, and the cities of Toronto, New York and Montreal.

The novel’s dual narrative is a “conversation” between retired bush pilot Will Bird (the elderly son of Three Day’s sharp-shooting Xavier) and his niece Annie. Lying comatose in a snowbound, Moose Factory hospital, Will “tells” his unspeakable story of loss, violence and retribution. Annie, sitting at her uncle’s bedside and willing him to live, describes her perilous journey to the cities of the far south, in search of her missing sister Suzanne.

It’s a powerful narrative structure: one that allows Boyden to simultaneously create tension and suspense and to weave together then blur the distinction between dichotomies of knowing versus not knowing, old versus young, past versus present, wilderness versus civilization, beauty versus ugliness, pain versus pleasure, human versus animal, preditor versus prey, life versus death.

“That place,” Will says of Moosonee, “it can be a sad, greedy town. You fall into your group of friends, and that’s that. Friends for life, minus the times you are enemies. Not too many people around here to choose from for friends, or for enemies. So choose right.”

There is humour to soften the heartache. We see Boyden’s world through Will’s whiskey goggles and feel the author’s compassion for even the most desperate and unsavoury characters. And, in the end, we’re not surprised that there is no true, discernable resolution. We don’t know for certain that Suzanne has safely returned, or that Will has come out of his coma intact, or what “intact” even means. Yet somehow, Boyden’s narrators find — embody, is perhaps a better word — redemption. Boyden’s world is brown and white, with the Moose River running through it.