The Runner

by Aaron Tucker

While traveling to the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, Clara Silver meets local landowner Allen Wheeler. While plotting against the Awa tribe occupying his land, Wheeler makes a business proposition Clara can’t refuse, before her heart stops beating on the beach shores of the Rio Doce. The following summer, Clara is set up by friends on bogus drug charges. After spending the 4th of July on the run from the LAPD and the next three months away under lock and key at the largest women’s penitentiary in California, she meets her yin-yang twin, Saxa Cheung, in Hong Kong that fall. Together, they devise a high-speed hijacking in an effort to expose a human trafficking ring and reunite Saxa with her missing sister, Jinghua. Soon thereafter, Clara finds she has unfinished business with Wheeler, as he holds Saxa’s life for ransom inside an abandoned railroad tunnel in the Himalayan Mountains.

Once Clara’s former cellmate, Alexis Alvarado Diaz, becomes her primary bargaining chip, Wheeler grants Alexis her freedom before requiring Clara to play by his rules on a deserted island in Puerto Rico. Only then will he agree to help find Saxa's missing sister.

Will Clara succeed in fighting for Alexis' freedom, and Jinghua’s, when she has nowhere left to run?

338 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 28, 2021

About the author

Aaron Tucker is the author of the forthcoming novel Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys with Coach House Books on June 6th, 2023. His essay “A Cowboy’s Work” was longlisted for the 2022 CBC Non-Fiction Prize and is part of a work-in-progress collection of essays.

Tucker’s latest poetry collection is Catalogue d’oiseaux (Book*hug Press, Spring 2021). His novel Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los Alamos (Coach House Books) was translated by Rachel Martinez into French as Oppenheimer (La Peuplade) in the summer of 2020. In addition, he is the author of two books of poetry, Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp (Bookthug Press) and punchlines (Mansfield Press), and two scholarly cinema studies monographs, Virtual Weaponry: The Militarized Internet in Hollywood War Films and Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema (both published by Palgrave Macmillan).

He is currently a PhD candidate in the Cinema and Media Studies Department at York University where he is an Elia Scholar, a VISTA doctoral Scholar and a 2020 Joseph-Armand Bombardier doctoral fellow. He is currently studying the cinema of facial recognition software and its impacts on citizenship, mobility and crisis.

He was born in Vernon B.C. and grew up in Lavington B.C., on the lands of the Syilx Okanagan Nation. Currently, he is a guest on the Dish with One Spoon Territory.