Jack Hodgins was born and raised in Merville, and Broken Ground is his most direct return to that ground. The novel imagines the community a few years after the real soldier settlement scheme brought WWI veterans to clear stump-choked land and try to farm it (the same history covered in “The Stump Ranchers”) and centres on the wildfire of 1922 that threatened to undo everything they’d built.
Hodgins moves between voices and time periods, weaving the settlers’ hopes and the war’s aftershocks into a portrait of a community staking everything on land that never wanted to be farmed. It won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and remains one of the clearest literary treatments of this specific piece of Comox Valley history.
A good pairing with the nonfiction reporting on the same settlement, for readers who want the story from the inside.
