Set against the backdrop of the tail end of the American Civil War, Keith Henderson’s “fictional tour de force” (Barbara Kay, The National Post), The Roof Walkers [DC Books], tells the story of how Canada as a nation came into being. This was not done via polite conversation and a friendly game of ice hockey, but through a no-holds-barred, bloody fight against a violent ethnocentric movement that threatened to hatch a “New Ireland” where Sherbrooke, Quebec currently stands.

Told through the eyes and letters of Eoin O’Donoghue, a twenty-year-old Irish Canadian, and his self-described “Judas informantcy” between the Irish Republican Army (otherwise known as Fenians) and Canada’s secret police, The Roof Walkers’ spellbinding narrative is more closely akin to that of Scorcese’s Gangs of New York than the National Film Board’s Heritage Minutes.

“The Roof Walkers sheds new light on the circumstances surrounding Confederation, on the nature of the Fenian threat that helped inspire it, as well as on the personal lives of the principal actors,” says Henderson of his third full-length novel. “It is a story that, in light of the state of immigration, terrorism, and domestic separatist independence movements in the world today, is perhaps more important for the world to be made aware of than ever before.”