STARFest presents Brian Thomas Isaac in conversation with Conor Kerr

Tickets can be purchased at shop.sapl.ca

Brian Thomas Isaac was born in 1950 on the Okanagan Indian Reserve. After completing grade eight, he found work in the Alberta oil fields and in construction, eventually retiring as a bricklayer. He came to writing late in life.

In 2022, his bestselling debut, All the Quiet Places, won an Indigenous Voices Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and was longlisted for the Giller Prize and CBC’s Canada Reads. He lives with his wife in West Kelowna, BC.

Bones of a Giant

Summer, 1968. For the first time since his big brother, Eddie, disappeared two years earlier—either a runaway or dead by his own hand—sixteen-year-old Lewis Toma has shaken off some of his grief.

His mother, Grace, and her friend Isabel have gone south to the United States to pick fruit to earn the cash Grace needs to put proper plumbing into the three-room shack they share on the reserve, leaving Lewis behind to spend the summer with his cousins, his Uncle Ned and his Aunt Jean in the new house they’ve built on their farm along the Salmon River. Their warm family life is so different from his own—almost enough to counter the pressures he feels as a boy trying to become a man in a place where responsible adult men are largely absent, broken by residential school and racism. Everywhere he looks, women carry the load, sometimes with kindness, but often with the bitterness, anger and ferocity of his own mother, who kicked Lewis’s lowlife father, Jimmy, to the curb long ago.

But now his dad is back in town, scheming on how to steal Grace’s hand. And then shocking revelations shake the family, unleashing a deadly force of anger and frustration.

With so many traps laid around him, how will Lewis find a safe path to the future?

Conor Kerr is a national award losing Métis/Ukrainian writer and bird hunter living in  amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton), born in Saskatoon, and raised in Buffalo Pound Lake and Drayton Valley. He is a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta. His Ukrainian family are settlers on Treaty 4 Territory. Conor is the author of the novels Avenue of Champions (2021), which won the 2022 RELIT Award, and Prairie Edge (2024), which was shortlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize and the 2024 Writer’s Trust Atwood Gibson Fiction Award and won the Crime Writers of Canada Best Novel award; as well as the poetry collections An Explosion of Feathers, and Old Gods which was shortlisted for the 2023 Governor General’s Award for Poetry and named one of CBC’s Best Books of 2023. His latest book is the poetic novella, Beaver Hills Forever (2025).