To Shadow the Sun — Earl Thompson

Following the battle of Culloden (1746), many Scots were captured and enslaved to work the mines of northern England. It took our family, a splinter of the Thompson clan, five generations to find freedom by fleeing to America and continuing west. This story, based on the memories of a family member, is a cohesive collage of literay non-fiction that picks up the journey in Western Canada during the First World War. To Shadow the Sun follows the trials and tribulations of four children from a pioneering family, as told in the narrative of the third child whose memoirs inspired this novel. The book opens in medias res and finds two family members in an intriguing predicament before readers are taken back to witness the unfolding story. After their mother dies, and with their father overseas fighting in the war, the children are sent to an Edmonton orphanage to fend for themselves. From the comfort of the family home to the bleak institutional life of the orphanage, they struggle to uphold their dying mother's request to look aftr each other and keep the family together. The contrast between the innocence of childhood and those that feed upon it, results in an emotional roller coaster ranging from heart-warming humour to heart-pounding suspense. It is a true drama that will appeal to fiction and non-fiction fans alike. It also provides an articulate glimpse of Canadian pioneering history, adding another brick to the great North American mosaic. A second novel, carrying the 'teen years' of the family, describes the continuing Thompson Saga and the hardships of prairie farming in the 1920s, as the boys are forced to flee their abusive father and seek thierown way to adulthood.