The novel was inspired by the life of Ojibwa Francis Pegahmagabow, the legendary First World War sniper. (Boyden’s ancestry is partly native.) The book was well received, but readers may not be prepared for the transformative, history-shaping power of Three-Day Road, which hits bookstores next month. Most of the stories unfold on reserves and examine the joys and tribulations of native life. next year.īoyden has published one previous book, the 2001 short-story collection Born with a Tooth. Boyden has been married for nine years to an American who’s also a writer Amanda Boyden’s first novel, Pretty Little Dirty, will be released by Vintage U.S.

He teaches Canadian literature and creative writing at the University of New Orleans and splits his time between Louisiana and Canada, which remains home to his mother and most of his siblings, as well as his 14-year-old son Jacob, who lives in Toronto with his mother. The book is a mesmerizing tale of two young Cree men who volunteer for that war and become snipers. Joseph’s maternal grandfather, as well as an uncle on his father’s side, had served in the First World War, and Boyden draws upon this fund of family stories for his first novel, Three-Day Road.

Raymond Boyden was not the only soldier in the family. I feel that I have always been searching for him, always wondering who he was.” “He was a frontline doctor who put his life on the line throughout Italy and Holland. “My father left a big legacy for all of us,” Boyden says. A medical officer renowned for his bravery, Raymond Wilfrid Boyden was awarded the Distinguished Service Order – he was the highest-decorated medical officer of the war. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders, about a group of teenaged outcasts, started him thinking about a career in writing.īut the stories he loved best were the true ones about his father, a Second World War military hero.

By the time he was six, he was making his way through the family’s Encyclopaedia Britannica, volume by volume, pausing now and then over a topic that held his attention. Less typically, Boyden was also a voracious early reader. They would chase the goats that their father, an old-fashioned doctor, occasionally accepted as payment for his medical services. He loved the outdoors, and along with his seven siblings would play war games and cowboys and Indians and roughhouse in the schoolyard next door. Growing up in Willowdale, Ontario, in the 1970s, Joseph Boyden was a typical little boy.

Three day road novel