Stephen Kimber

Shortlisted for the…

2007 Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction

2007 Crime Writers’ of Canada First Novel Award…

Read an excerpt

They were boyhood best friends. One black, one white. But they’d grown up and apart. Ray, the son of Africville’s last schoolmaster who’d had his brief, shining moment in the seventies as a black activist leader, is now a jaded lawyer specializing in real estate deals and plea bargains. And Ward, the son of a blackballed fisherman who’d had his own turn in the seventies’ spotlight as the province’s most promising young politician, has become a judge who worries more about the state of his prostate than the justice of the state. Now, more than 25 years after they fell in love with the same woman, the two men must face each other again, this time in a courtroom. The explosive trial will force both of them to finally confront the demons of their own pasts and reveal secrets they’d kept hidden, even from themselves.

Stephen Kimber, an award-winning journalist and broadcaster, has written a page-turning legal thriller, a sophisticated tale fueled by power, sex, the politics of race, and an impassioned quest for justice.

“Stephen Kimber has woven a difficult story about racism and power politics in Nova Scotia with exceptional skill and sensitivity… an important literary voyage into a largely unexplored region of the Canadian experience… reads as fiction… resonates as history.”

Linden MacIntyre

“Canadians have waited too long for an entertaining, ambitous, multi-layered novel about the historic black community of Africville, but they need wait no longer… an entertaining, provocative legal thriller about power and race relations in Nova Scotia… bold, outrageous, and dangerous.”

Lawrence Hill

Online Bonus:

Whatever happened to Rosa?