Icefields was the first novel by author Thomas Wharton, published in 1995 by NeWest Press after beginning life as his Master’s thesis. Presented as a tourist guidebook, it is a historical novel that shows the slow transformation of Jasper as time and the coming of the railroad change it from a small mountain settlement into a modern tourist town. Upon publication the book won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book (Canada and Caribbean) as well as the inaugural Banff Mountain Book grand prize. For NeWest Press, it helped launch a series that continues today.
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This year marks forty years of supporting and celebrating some of Canada’s finest literary presses for our parent organization, the Literary Press Group of Canada. To help celebrate, for the entire month of October All Lit Up will be highlighting books from our publishers that either helped launch a new voice in CanLit or made an impact at the press it was published with. Go on a CanLit Rewind with us to rediscover some backlist gems!Icefields was the first novel by author Thomas Wharton, published in 1995 by NeWest Press after beginning life as his Master’s thesis. Presented as a tourist guidebook, it is a historical novel that shows the slow transformation of Jasper as time and the coming of the railroad change it from a small mountain settlement into a modern tourist town. Upon publication the book won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book (Canada and Caribbean) as well as the inaugural Banff Mountain Book grand prize. For NeWest Press, it helped launch a series that continues today.* * *
Icefieldsis probably the highest-profile book ever released by NeWest Press, garnering reviews and readers from across the globe. For most people, it is the first book from our press that they’ve come in contact with, especially considering how popular it is in Canadian literature classes and its appearance on Canada Reads in 2008. In Canada, where it’s now in its seventh printing, Icefields has sold over 30,000 copies. It has also been published in the US, Britain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands.Icefields proved that the NeWest Press Nunatak First Fiction Series would be a great incubator for new Western authors, and an imprimatur of quality first novels. In Icefields, Wharton blends geology and poetry, fact and fiction, history and imagination so seamlessly, reconstructing the past with just the traces left behind. It really set the standard for the series, which has added such classics as Chorus of Mushrooms by Hiromi Goto, The Shore Girl by Fran Kimmel, and Dance, Gladys, Dance by Cassie Stocks to its list. The series has become a first stop for readers looking for excellent debut Canadian fiction.Icefields stands for us as one of the best Canadian books of the 1990s, and an excellent exploration of a part of Canadian fiction that is still underdeveloped, Arctic stories. Wharton himself says that he writes because he is such a huge reader and when there isn’t a book that he wants to read, he writes it. He described this a little further in depth in reference to Icefields in an interview with Studies in Canadian Literature: “I was supplying, for myself perhaps, a modernist novel that Canada had never had, right, at the actual time high modernism — or whatever you want to call it — was at its peak. There wasn’t anything like that in Canada. Canada was still struggling to develop any kind of a literature at that point and there wasn’t any experimentation and so on going on. I like to think of Icefields as a modernist novel slightly out of its time.”* * *Only five more CanLit Rewind titles to go… relive the literary magic here.
