Reminiscent of a novel like Michael Punke’s The Revenant, Ian McGuire’s new work, White River Crossing, also thrusts readers into the cold, disease, mud, hunger, and fear that, like an untrustworthy fellow traveler, skulk beside a doubtful trek into callous backcountry. However, in McGuire’s case, the setting is eighteenth-century French-controlled Canada, and the goal is to locate and mine a deep vein of granite-held gold.
A disparate assemblage of Hudson Bay Company men, led by a trio of Indigenous guides, make their way from the protection of their rough trading post into this wild and wooly Nature, shorn of the promise of daily provisions and relative security. In time, sub-arctic desolation leads to fatal white blindness, commencing with a violent sexual encounter and ending with a considerable body count. Nature, meanwhile, takes its unswerving course.
Author of a 2016 New York Times Best Fiction Book, The North Water, and a critically well-received biography of Richard Ford, Yorkshire-born McGuire studied at the University of Virginia, the University of Sussex, and the University of Manchester, where he co-directs its Centre for New Writing, which he co-founded. This interview was conducted via email.
Ryan Asmussen
Your subarctic Canadian wilderness is forbidding territory, populated by Indigenous peoples who aren’t typically read about and discussed in popular culture. How demanding was the research for this novel?
Ian McGuire
My main sources were books written by eighteenth-century British fur traders who described, often in great detail, the flora and fauna of the Hudson Bay area, the climate, the appearance and customs of the indigenous populations, and also the process of buying and selling furs and of sustaining life by feeding and keeping everyone warm in the trading posts. As well as doing that kind of reading, I also travelled to northern Canada in 2023, mainly to Manitoba and Nunavut, to get a sense of the landscape and also to spend time in the Hudson’s Bay Company archives in Winnipeg. I usually find the research process enjoyable. It’s not just about accumulating period details; you also discover new facts that can affect the story itself and the way you develop the characters.
Ryan Asmussen
Were there any particularly tough areas of accuracy to get right? Any that eventually evaded you for lack of documentation?
Ian McGuire
Hilary Mantel, the great historical novelist, once said that “history is what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it.” Meaning, I think, that most of the evidence is always missing. So, yes, there are lots of questions about how people behaved and what they did back then that we just don’t have a definite answer to, but that can be as much an opportunity as a problem for a novelist because it gives you permission to invent. For example, although there is definitely a lot of gold in the far north of Canada, there is no written record of anyone searching for it in the eighteenth century, so the process I describe in the novel is mainly based on educated guesswork.
Ryan Asmussen
We have a well-drawn, complex cast of characters present. Was there one who—even though a reader wouldn’t necessarily be able to see this on the page—captured more of your imagination? Challenged you, intrigued you more? More fun to write about?
Ian McGuire
In White River Crossing, more than in my previous novels, I wanted to offer a wide range of perspectives, so we see the world through the eyes of the English characters, the Dene family who guide them north, and several members of the Inuit group they meet there. Having that variety of perspectives and those competing voices was central to my thinking from the beginning. In some sense, all the characters are equally important, but if I had to choose one whom I would have liked to spend a bit more time with (had the plot allowed me to), it would probably be Unaleq, the Inuit Shaman. The nature of religious belief is one of the topics the novel explores, and Unaleq offers a particularly interesting angle on it.
Ryan Asmussen
Of course, the situation and plot dictate that it will be a rough go for the Prince of Wales’ Fort crew and their native guides. Without spoiling the story, was there a moment in the writing that surprised even you by its harrowing nature?
Ian McGuire
My usual tendency is to have the most harrowing things, or at least the things that seem to me most harrowing, happen off-stage. In White River Crossing, we certainly witness some gruesome events, but there are a couple of acts of violence that are central to the plot and aren’t narrated directly; we only see their aftermath. That was a conscious choice on my part.
Ryan Asmussen
In the three characters from the outpost, we have one who is essentially an idealist: Thomas Hearn, one, John Shaw, who is a pragmatist butting heads with the idealist, and one, Abel Walker, who is emerging from innocence to experience. Abel can’t help but watch and debate within himself which of the two contrary men should be emulated. How important was this thick triangle of influence for you to get right before you tackled the workings of the plot? Or did this relationship organically emerge in the writing?
Ian McGuire
When I think about the contrast between Hearn and Shaw, I’m reminded of W. B. Yeats’ famous lines: “the best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of a passionate intensity.” Both men represent potential father-figures for Abel Walker, and yes, you’re quite right, the question is which way he will go. Hearn wants to guide him away from Shaw, but he’s also hobbled by his own self-doubt. I had that complicated dynamic in my mind pretty much from the beginning, I think. Father-son relationships of one kind or another often play a big part in my fiction.
Ryan Asmussen
Their Indigenous guides, as well as the Esquimaux they encounter, are neither placid, solely peaceful people, nor are they bloodthirsty savages: you render them with an often touching humanity, as must be the case. Was this a difficult cultural reach for you, to connect with multiple Indigenous characters, be faithful to their reality, while, naturally, not being an eighteenth-century Chipewyan?
Ian McGuire
This is an issue that I’ve thought about a great deal. As a historical novelist, as I see it, you can only operate if you believe that beneath cultural and historical differences, however extreme they appear, there also lies a human commonality which is just as real and meaningful. Indigenous people living two hundred and fifty years ago certainly saw the world in very specific and distinctive ways, but I don’t assume that means that their inner lives are imaginatively inaccessible to someone like me. If I did assume that, then the book would have been impossible to write. Discovering a method which recognises and honours both elements of that relationship, difference and commonality, is tricky but essential. I hope I get the balance right in White River Crossing, but whether I do or not is something that each reader will have to decide for themselves.
Ryan Asmussen
What is your particular take on historical fiction as a genre? What does it especially offer us that contemporary fiction, perhaps, doesn’t?
Ian McGuire
I wouldn’t ever want to suggest that historical fiction is superior to fiction set in the present, but I think the two ways of writing can certainly complement each other. Novels set in the present can be very good at exploring the details of our current social and political concerns, but historical fiction, if it aims to do more than just entertain, is able to encourage the longer view and to remind us that the problems we face nowadays, though they seem brand new, may be rooted in tendencies that persist over hundreds or even thousands of years.
FICTION
By Ian McGuire
Crown
Published February 24, 2026
