SUFFERANCE

Set on the border between an under-resourced Indian reserve and a small town, Thomas King's SUFFERANCE is a fast-paced, voice-driven novel about privilege, power, and the mysterious deaths of a dozen billionaires.

Jeremiah Camp, a.k.a. the Forecaster, has a gift: he can look into the heart of humanity and see the patterns that create opportunities and profits for the rich and powerful. For a while, he uses his talents to make money for a multinational consortium called the Locken Group. Eventually, what he sees leaves him without hope for either himself or for humanity, and he quits.

Returning to the reserve where his mother lived before his life became a game of “foster home roulette,” he hides out in an old residential school with no phone, no internet, no mailbox, and no television, hoping to finally disconnect from the world. But nobody told the locals that he wanted to be left alone, and when his mother's cousin Ada's daughter and granddaughter arrive and need a place to live, they shelter with him in the school. Then trouble comes knocking: the list of billionaires Jeremiah left behind when he quit his job strangely corresponds to a series of sudden deaths among the ultra-rich that no one has been able to explain. And when Ash Locken arrives on his doorstep to enlist Jeremiah's help with one last forecast, she isn't about to take no for an answer.

With a wry and witty voice, a memorable cast of characters and a vividly rendered setting, SUFFERANCE offers a fresh fictional take on inequality, the way billionaires rig the system in their favor, and the redemptive power of bonds old and new.

THOMAS KING, a Western American Literary Association Lifetime Achievement Award winner, is one of Canada's most critically acclaimed and commercially successful writers and was featured in October in O Magazine's Oprah's 31 Native American Authors to Read Right Now. The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America, his brilliant, bestselling, multi-award-winning work of narrative non-fiction, has been adapted into a powerful and critically acclaimed documentary that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, winning the People's Choice Documentary Award and earning praise as a “hidden gem” by the Hollywood Reporter. Among his other books are an ongoing series of bestselling mystery novels featuring Cherokee ex-cop Thumps DreadfulWater and numerous award-winning literary novels including his most recent, Indians on Vacation, which has topped the Indie bestseller list in Canada since its publication in August 2020 and been praised by Margaret Atwood for its “great grumpy dialogue and killer one-liners”. Originally from California, he is of Cherokee and Greek descent, and lives in Guelph, Ontario. Thomas King has been awarded the 2022 Pierre Berton Award, celebrating those who have brought Canadian history to a wider audience.