Twenty years after publishing B.C. author Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s best-selling debut novel, A Cure for Death by Lightning, Knopf Canada has acquired the author’s fifth novel, The Spawning Grounds, to appear in fall 2016.

The story follows two present-day teenagers in a Shuswap County, B.C., community where white and native cultures are separated by a river that both of their livelihoods depend on, and where tragedy is shared.

Knopf Publisher Anne Collins says in a press release:

It’s exciting and somehow really fitting to be publishing a new novel by Gail in the 20th anniversary year of the New Face of Fiction, since she was one of the four writers who published novels in that first year  … This book hovers beautifully in the fluid boundary between two cultures, between past and present, between the ordinary world and the world of the spirit: all disordered by the human and environmental crises that have knit the native and white world together here in drama and love and tragedy for 150 years.

The deal was arranged by Jackie Kaiser of Westwood Creative Artists.