Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook is a spare, elliptical Canadian modernist novel set in a remote British Columbia community, where murder, prophecy, family violence, desire and religious dread are sort of, the general vibe.

It is less a conventional plot than a charged little system of voices: people watching one another, judging one another, half-speaking, half-mythologising, caught between the everyday and the biblical. First published in 1959, it is often treated as one of the key works of Canadian literary modernism, with Watson pushing the regional novel into something much stranger: prose-poem, folk tragedy, moral fever dream.

T.S. Eliot and others reportedly passed on it before McClelland & Stewart published it; the first run sold out, and it later became one of those books people call “seminal” when they mean “small, difficult, and annoyingly impossible to ignore.”

McClelland & Stewart paperback edition, copyright 1959. Later printing/reissue. Light shelf wear, rubbing and handling to covers, with some creasing/marks; pages clean and binding sound.