The Wabeno Feast — Wayland Drew

When an environmental disaster destroys Toronto, four childhood friends are forced to abandon their urban middle-class lives and choose the extremes by which they will survive. One man, Paul Henry, returns to the northern Ontario land of his youth, seeking to escape and endure deep within the wilderness, away from all contact with others. As he journeys, he encounters many people whose lives formed his own, and whose lives are now crumbling and deserted like the communities that hold them. Paul's quest is an echo of the journey of another man, Drummond MacKay, an eighteenth-century fur trader whose diary Paul reads and burns as he travels further into a landscape that knows nothing of time or man. A Canadian literature classic, The Wabeno Feast was first published with Anansi in 1973. It belongs next to the Temptations of Big Bear, Surfacing, and The Diviners in the Canadian literary canon.