The Reincarnation of Isaac Brock

How did Great Britain bungle away her colonies in North America? How did she manage to save Canada from the Americans? And how has Canada managed to survive in the face of American imperialism, and a divisive French-speaking minority? These questions are the main subject matter of the novel, with a modern love story thrown in for good measure. In 1993, widower Fred Bonney, 55 years old, a dreamer and social misfit, is downsized from the Canadian Public Service. To save himself from alcoholism, he decides to write a book about his North American ancestors, and he recruits well-preserved, 39-year-old Josée Tremblay as travelling companion and bedmate. Of French ancestry, she is athletic, a devout Catholic, separated from her husband, and unhappily barren. Her brother Pierre, an ex-hockey player and avid supporter of the independence movement in the Province of Quebec, is a student of French history in North America, and author of a definitive thesis on the subject. Fred and Josée first go to Sandwich in England, where Fred's ancestor Thomas lived before emigrating to the Plymouth colony in 1634. Of significance to Josée is that Thomas fathered eight children after he was fifty, and she begins to hope that Fred is similarly potent. At a graveyard in Sandwich, they meet Colonel Sir Richard (Dickie) Bonney, a lonely widower and successful writer. He becomes their guide and sponsor during their stay, and convinces Fred to co-author a military history of British North America featuring the Bonney family. Josée offers to be secretary to them both and to translate the book into French, and persuades them that her ancestors should also be written into the story, thus giving both sides of the colonial wars between Britain and France. For background, she will use her brother Pierre's thesis.