As Joseph Burbidge comes to discover, finding gold in Canada's North is less than half the battle.

Joe is blessed with resolve and with good partners to share the load. Stinky Riley is a wrangler and bush pilot who is Joe's first mentor in prospecting. Isidore Chartrand is a hunter and trapper who accompanies Joe on his northernmost odyssey, and more than once, saves Joe's life. Joe has to fight to protect his claim, and this conflict sets in motion a moral dilemma that will dog him for the rest of his life.

On the long trail from high adventure and romance to atonement, readers will meet some delightful, complex, and sometimes malicious characters. Carpenter's latest novel is a quest for more than one kind of gold.

"Canadian history is inextricably connected to geography. And Canadian fiction seems endlessly absorbed with a reckoning between the land and the humans who exploit it. Saskatchewan's David Carpenter has staked out one indelible corner of this geography."
- Stephen Beattie, Quill and Quire

"David Carpenter knows how to mine a story for characters the way his characters know how to pan for gold, and he comes up with enough gleaming nuggets to make The Gold a rollicking, wide-ranging, all-embracing joy to read."
- Wayne Grady, author of Emancipation Day

"A coming of age story, a high-spirited adventure, a thoughful meditation on the pitfalls of obsession and desire, The Gold is a delight, a headlong current of entertaining narrative offering up a literary nugget on every page."
- Guy Vanderhaeghe, author of The Last Crossing

"Who among us has not been tempted by shiny things that in the end do not satisfy? In The Gold, David Carpenter has created a fascinating tale of temptation, perdition, and atonement that takes us from the slag heaps of west Yorkshire to the muskeg and rock of Canada's north to an upscale Edmonton neighbourhood. Joe Burbidge, with gold on his mind, traverses this terrain, gathering by increments a complex and Dickensian moral tangle that takes him from innocence to remorse and restitution. This sweeping narrative shows Carpenter at his tale-weaving best."
- Trevor Herriot, author of Towards a Prairie Atonement and Islands of Grass