It’s The Hard Knock Life
Beasts of New York
By Jon Evans
22 Sep, 2017
A Year of Waterloo Region Speculative Fiction
To quote his Wikipedia entry, Arthur Ellis award-winner Jon Evans was
(b)orn to an expatriate Rhodesian father and Canadian mother. Evans grew up in Waterloo, Ontario and graduated from the University of Waterloo. He has a degree in electrical engineering and over 10 years of experience working as a software engineer.
He’s also a former customer of mine, from the days when I owned a game store. Small world!
2011’s Beasts of New York won the Foreword Medal of the Year Award.
Patch son of Silver, of the Seeker clan, of the Treetops tribe, of the Center Kingdom, faces calamity, as do all his compatriots. Long winter means food stores are pressed to their limits and beyond. Instead of a meagre supply barely able to see Patch and his kin to spring, there is nothing. Starvation looms.
Patch discovers that his clan and kind face an existential threat that is far greater than a lean winter. The fate of the beasts of New York rests on the shoulders of Patch the squirrel.