Our Homesick Songs

While Etta and Otto and Russell and James was a novel at home in Saskatchewan and the Canadian prairies, Hooper's next book, Our Homesick Songs is focused on the rough, wind-blown rocks of island outpost communities in
Newfoundland, and is based on true events of the devastating 1990's Atlantic fisheries collapse. 

Through the mist and the wind and the rain, eleven-year old Finn counts the fishing boats out his window every night. When he was young there were more than the highest number he knew. Now there are none. The fish have gone, and with them hope for his small Newfoundland outport island, as one by one neighbours, relatives and friends move away, west. After Finn’s sister Cora runs away one night too, leaving no hint of where she’s gone or for how long, Finn decides the only way he can save his family and his island, his home, is to get the fish back himself. With nothing but caribou, lichen and wind for company and help, Finn makes a plan...

Our Homesick Songs tells intertwined, setting-rich love stories: that of a family divided by the breadth of their country, of a culture and people struggling to maintain roots while continuously displaced ever westward, and of the uneasy and immovable footprint of history on the endeavours of the present. And there are mermaids…