September 30, 2026
Naoyak, by Norma Dunning
With Naoyak, Norma Dunning follows up the Governor General’s Award-winning Tainna with a warm and rollicking novel about an Inuit woman whose plan for a better life for her son involves becoming inextricably bound to an inept researcher with an uncanny resemblance to Conan O’Brien, and following him all the back from the north to his home in Sherwood Park, Alberta, moving straight into the apartment in his basement. Naoyak is already behind on her plan to leave for the south by the time she’s 25, but luckily she makes up for lost time by being accompanied by the spirit of her grandmother and also Kiviuk, the giant guardian of Inuit lore who’s been watching over since birth.
It’s through their influence and also her own peculiar charm that Naoyak manages to win the researcher over (overcoming her own ambivalence to do so), and also secure a job at the university as a “community liaison” between university officials working on a study about Indigenous health and the people back home in her north community. But such a role is less straightforward than Naoyak imagines, and presumes that the academics would be approaching community members in relationship and not simply as another extension of the colonial scheme. When it turns out that this might not the case, its the southerners’ turn to get schooled.
Dunning’s fiction debut Annie Muktuk and Other Stories was such a revelation, and she keeps on giving with this latest release, with an audacious protagonist who’s just as unforgettable.
