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National Post
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- National Post
Indigenous author who dropped out of junior high school releases second novel
Article content Brian Thomas Isaac's voice is quietly matter of fact when he talks about growing up poor in a home without electricity in British Columbia's Okanagan Indian Reserve. 'That was simply how it was,' he remembers. Article content Many years later, the minutiae of those childhood years would inform his late-flowering success as an acclaimed Canadian novelist whose latest work, Bones of a Giant has just been published. But at the moment he simply needs to emphasize how important it was when hydro finally did arrive. Article content Article content 'It would be a step into the future for us,' Isaac says on the phone from his home in Kelowna. 'You don't realize at the time how bad you've had it until there's a change for the better.'' Article content Isaac's early memories, inextricably intertwined with his creative being, become more intense when he explains why he quit school in Grade 8. The racism he experienced as an Indigenous youth was more than he could bear. 'It was just horrible. I couldn't take it,' he says. Article content Isaac needs to evoke the past in order to provide context for his emergence at the age of 71 — after decades of working as a bricklayer and in the Alberta oilpatch — as an award-winning Canadian writer. It took this junior-high dropout 17 years to complete his debut novel, All the Quiet Places, a coming-of-age story about life on a First Nations reserve back in the 1960s. Published four years ago, it won an Indigenous Voices Award, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction. Article content Article content Now its successor, Bones of a Giant, has arrived on a wave of advance praise from the likes of veteran journalist Carol Off and award-winning novelist Thomas Wharton. Meanwhile, for Isaac, writing remains an ongoing learning process that's gradually getting easier. Article content 'This second novel, Bones of a Giant, took me two years. I'm now working on the third book of my trilogy — it will probably be finished within a month.' Article content Isaac writes about courage, resilience and survival in the face of racism, poverty and the antiquated tentacles of the 19th Century Indian act. But one also encounters warmth, humanity and humour in his pages — and, perhaps most significantly, a celebration of family. Article content 'When I first started writing these books, I just wanted readers to know that First Nations people are people first,' Isaac says. 'This book is not about hate — more than anything else it's about how a family survives together and what they learn. My first thought was to write in a way that would allow the reader to know more about First Nations people, by walking with them and seeing the highs and lows, and in this way give readers a sense of what it was like.'
CBC
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Brian Thomas Isaac says the follow-up to his award-winning debut novel mirrors his own life
Social Sharing It's the summer of 1968 and 16-year-old Lewis Toma is spending the summer with his cousins while his mom picks fruit in the United States. It's a summer of firsts — living in a home with more modern conveniences, like a hot shower, and drinking beer and eating greasy chicken while listening to rock 'n' roll music. This all happens two years after Lewis's brother disappeared. That's the situation in Syilx writer Brian Thomas Isaac's new book, Bones of a Giant, the sequel to his award-winning debut novel All the Quiet Places. Bones of a Giant mirrors his life, Isaac told CBC's Radio West host Sarah Penton. Growing up on the Okanagan Indian Reserve, he said he and his mother and grandmother were isolated. "There was nobody up there. Nobody. We lived in a house with basically the whole world to ourselves. It was lonely, but then we got used to it." When he had to leave his home and go to school for the first time, he was terrified. "It's like going to Mars to me, you know? I didn't know what to expect and it was scary." He left school in Grade 8, because Isaac said he couldn't take the racism, and became a labourer. At 18, Isaac left his home in B.C. for northern Alberta to work in the oil patch for two years. He returned to his community with a nice new car, but missed the money he was making up north, so left again. When it didn't work out, he returned back to the Okanagan. He was a bricklayer for many years before he became a writer — at age 70. "When I was really young, I wrote a lot of poetry," Isaac said. While working on fixing up a home he and his wife had bought, he sat down and he started writing. Before he knew it, he had the makings of a novel. "I didn't know how to write," he said. "I read for two years the best books I could get my hands on, and it kind of came through me, you know, like osmosis and then I finished the book. I got a great editor. She was just amazing, taught me so much." 36 Canadian books you should be reading in May Isaac describes his first book as "cleansing," but said Bones of a Giant was much more fun to write. "Friday nights my wife and I would, in the old days, we'd read little short stories to each other for fun," he said. "Now, we sit around and I read my week's work and we have great laughs and discussions. She's amazing to bounce ideas off." In his writing, his intention is to show that First Nations people are just that — people. "We all have pains and we all have tears," Isaac said. "I really wanted people to experience what it's like to walk right beside someone, to walk them through the whole book."
