White Heat by M. J. McGrath

August 2014

Melanie McGrath is a British author who has a particular interest in Inuit culture. In her book The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic, she recounts the tragic Canadian forced relocation of the Ungava Inuit people. During the Cold War, the United States and Canada together ran a weather station on Ellesmere Island. Because the Canadian government felt it would be beneficial to have permanent residents there, the government forced the Ungava Inuit to move twelve hundred miles north of their home and inhabit the island. The relocation was very difficult to the Ungava as Ellesmere Island, located in the arctic desert, is one of the harshest climates ever to be inhabited continually by people.

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In 2011 McGrath published her first work of fiction, a novel called White Heat. The work is set in Ellesmere Island, Unmingmak Nuna, an area in the far north reaches of Canada. Edie Kiglatuk, a woman who is half white and half Inuit, works as a guide for hunters, fisherman, and explorers, as well as a part-time schoolteacher for her stepson Joe. One spring, Edie and Joe lead two white men across Jones Sound to Craig Island, but when they arrive one of the men is mysteriously shot and killed. Edie and Joe know that it was a murder, but the Inuit Council of Elders, fearing the loss of tourism, cover it up as an accidental death. Things become complicated when an investigator arrives to look into the matter.

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"My fascination is with place and its role in human existence. I am interested in all kinds of places, real and imaginary. My greatest passion is for the borders and margins, those regions both literal and metaphorical where places intersect. That's where all the most interesting things happen."

EDIE KIGLATUK MYSTERIES

            White heat (Aug 2011)     #1

The boy in the snow: an Edie Kiglatuk mystery (Nov 2012)    #2

The bone seeker (Jul 2014)    #4

OTHER WRITINGS:

• Motel Nirvana: Dreaming of the New Age in the American Desert (travel book), 1994.
• Hard, Soft, and Wet (nonfiction),, 1998.
• Silvertown: An East End Family Memoir,  2002.
• The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic, 2007.
• Hopping: The Hidden Lives of an East End Hop Picking Family, 2009.

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