A father comes out to his daughter as a woman. Or at least, he was once a woman. It's complicated. Funny. Painful. Eventually joyful. Meanwhile the daughter, who was adopted, has her own identity issues. At the Aboriginal addictions treatment centre where she works, everyone assumes she is indigenous. But is she? How can she find out? Cardinal Divide explores the hunger for certainty and the mutability of identity, whether of gender, race or sexuality. Authenticity isn't simple. Acting as somebody else is simultaneously a way to deceive and to explore the world. Characters who pass as male, as white, as straight, straddle the cardinal divides. And then, sometimes, passing is becoming.
Inside it's hot, dark. The smell of spruce needles in rain washes through my chest, something browner underneath. Pelts line log walls, in one corner a bed made of stout branches. Something hisses and sputters.
Praise for Nina Newington's first novel, Where Bones Dance: [A]n engaging and moving story of loss and discovery, revealed through dreamlike and delicate vignettes. Newington is an observer who retains the purity, the incomprehension and the sometimes powerful insight of a child, and this is what makes her book so memorable.
Lola Aragon, Times Literary Supplement