8th House to Publish Canada Strikes Back: A Novel of America's Occupation of Canada

8th House Publishing will publish Canada Strikes Back, a forthcoming novel by Richard Rathwell that imagines a near-future in which the United States has quietly absorbed its northern neighbour.

The novel opens in British Columbia's Fraser Valley with Nadia Okafor, a Tim Hortons supervisor and graduate student — an ordinary person living in a country that no longer exists. It is a story of occupation without war: not an invasion, but an absorption, accomplished through paperwork rather than bombs. And the resistance that rises to meet it comes not from capitals or armories, but from neighbours.

Rathwell grounds the story in a specific geography — the hills, the valley, and a community that refuses to become an abstraction on someone else's map.