NEVER GOING BACK, A Novel by Antonia Banyard (1st Ed. SIGNED)

Author: Antonia Banyard. Published by Thistledown Press, Saskatoon, SK., 2010, 1st Edition. SIGNED by the Author. Printed in Canada. Almost New Condition SOFTCOVER Book. Clean inside, tight spine. Size: 8.5 x 5.5 inch, 278 pages.

NEVER GOING BACK is about four days, five friends, a birth, a death, and a suicide. Ten years after high school, five friends who were once inseparable are reunited in their home town of Nelson, BC. Each friend is forced to confront secrets from the past.

Never Going Back is as much a mediation on memory and guilt as it is a novel. It examines a community’s responsibility for the happiness and well-being of its outcasts, and mourns the personal cost of the cruelties we commit to save ourselves. I think you will enjoy it, so long as you don’t expect sweeping drama or large epiphanies. The book begins with the death of a culprit and ends with a birth, but these are bookends of a diffuse narrative driven more by ideas than by plot. The tragedy, after all took place ten years before the story begins, so the drama comes to us as memories that, while still raw, are incapable of causing further harm. You’d be hard pressed to assign the role of main character. Siobhan’s perspective begins the book; we then meet Evan and Lance. But none of these characters is any more capable of taking hold of the story than they are of taking hold of their lives. Banyard describes Nelson as “not a backwoods town, so much as an eddy in a stream.” These characters might well be leaves stuck in that eddy and the resolution, satisfying, though small, is that by the last page all three will be able, finally, to free themselves and move on. -Reviewed by Mary on Goodreads

For more info on this Author, please see: About – Antonia Banyard