Eric Hoffer Book Award honorable mention

I hope you get drafted and you go to Vietnam and you get shot and you die there!

Those words, spoken in the anger of youth, marked the end of the torrid 1960s college romance of Annette DuBose and Gabe Pender. She would marry a fellow antiwar activist and end up immigrating to Canada. He would fight in Vietnam and come home to build an American Dream kind of life.

Forty years later, they have reconnected and discovered a shared passion: solo canoeing in Ontario’s raw Quetico wilderness. They decide to meet again to catch up on old times, not in a cafÉ but on Annette’s favorite island deep in the Quetico wilds.

Though they try to control their expectations for their rendezvous, they both approach the island with a growing realization of the emotional void in their lives and wonder how different everything might have been if they had stayed together. They must overcome challenges just to reach the island. Then they encounter the greatest challenge of all—each other.