Things Worth Burying

By: Matt Mayr

Narrated by: David Attar

As a third-generation logger, a life in the bush is all Joe Adler has ever known. He works, he hunts; he provides. But when a man dies on his watch, and his wife abandons their young family for writing school in Toronto, Joe must face the consequences of his hard-living ways.

Left alone to care for his seven-year-old daughter, he enlists the help of Jenny Lacroix, the wife of the man whose death he might be responsible for. Resentful and angry, and his conscience over Jenny’s husband far from clear, Joe threatens to spiral down the path of fury, booze, and violence that did his father in. What follows is a stunning tale of love and redemption, hatred and forgiveness, set amid the desolate cutovers, crystalline lakes, and rolling black spruce forests north of Lake Superior, and in a small logging town called Black River, once mighty and now derelict, in its final throes of existence.

Things Worth Burying is a novel set in a region that is rarely written about, the small resource-based communities that exist along the Trans-Canada Highway and its tributaries, from Sault Ste. Marie to Thunder Bay, the land north of Superior, a land of miners and loggers living a life in the bush, making ends meet, making do with the rise and fall of market economies that determine so much of their fate. Drawing upon his Northern Ontario upbringing, Mayr brings us a single story pulled from a working-class people who in the face of disappearing jobs and shrinking populations make the difficult choice to stay because the land, the life, is in their blood.

©2020 Matt Mayr (P)2022 Baraka Books

Critic reviews

“Mayr, who grew up in Northern Ontario, perfectly captures the tone of small town life, of men who work in the bush, where, as Adler says, ‘Death … was measured in minutes and small errors.’ This is a world of friendly neighbours and vicious gossip, of mutual support and petty grudges, where the hotel bar is the only public place left to drink...” — Toronto Star

“Mayr’s three-dimensional characters capture working class life in a small town, a life many readers will remember, fondly or otherwise… [he] digs deep into the dysfunctional family in which Joe grew up and at the same time creates a window revealing the beauty of the rugged northern Ontario bush.” — Gordon Arnold, Winnipeg Free Press

“[Mayr] writes about the Canadian bush, in particular, with a profound awe for its beauty and a healthy respect for its dangers. He also sets up Things Worth Burying for a tragic outcome befitting a life and livelihood spent at the mercy of such an uncompromising landscape.” — Joel Yanofsky, Montreal Review of Books