As I watched my father stand in court, guilty and alone, I realized I was seeing him as a man for the first time.
Gerry Smith grew up fifty-five kilometres from Temagami, the hometown of his long-absent father, Dale King, but he didn’t know the once-legendary hockey player. Even after Gerry, as an adult, reconnects with the Anishinaabe relatives on his dad’s side of the family, Dale remains a mystery — a missing puzzle piece.
It’s not until Gerry’s in his late twenties, struggling with divorce and debts, raising a young son of his own, that Dale finally drops back into his life. In a sports bar in Toronto, Dale pitches a lucrative but illicit business venture, setting in motion an unlikely partnership that will test how far both father and son will go in the name of family. As Gerry tries to make sense of the man behind the myth, he soon realizes that all he thought he knew about his father — and about himself — is only a fraction of the whole story.
In this propulsive debut novel that draws on both Anishinaabe storytelling and film noir influences, The Return of the Nish explores the tragedy of lost opportunities, the cyclical nature of time, and how people and places return to us in new lights.
“Tyson Stewart's excellent first novel, The Return of the Nish, is a surprising tale, of good and bad, of sons and fathers, of what is the right path and what path to avoid. Smoothly written, it covers two generations of Anishnaabe men, and everything that entails. I found myself leaning forward as I read, anticipating what was going to happen next.”
– Drew Hayden Taylor
“Steadfast and sure-footed, Tyson Stewart’s The Return of the Nish is a heart-forward story of identity, reconnection, and the things we sacrifice in order to find ourselves.”
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