Malcolm Kempt
Fiction 2026 / 272 pages
When A Gift Before Dying opens, it is -31degrees in the town of Cape Dorset, population 1100 Inuit and 200 Qalllunaaq, or non-Inuit, in The Arctic Circle.
The author Kempt viscerally and astonishingly pulls you into the unbearable cold, from explaining how a hunter lays on the ice, waiting for the seal to return to its air hole (a seal can hold its breath for an hour!), to dog-fur mitts, wind chill hitting at 100 below, frost bitten toes. Clearly, he has lived in the Arctic, not just done his research. This is not a sea and surf environment!
Cape Dorset has one of the highest crime rates in North America, rampant drug usage, lack of treatment resources, and isolation. Violence is the answer to most all problems. The children and teens of Cape Dorset are violent, unkind, self-centered and non-compassionate, and the adults are only worse.
In A Gift Before Dying by Malcolm Kempt, apparitions and ghostly visitations blur the line between standard police procedure and a supernatural thriller. The deceased teenage girl, Pitseolala, appears as an eerie presence to both the disgraced policeman Elderick Cole and her younger brother Maliktu, driving them with a shared mission to find the reason for her suicide, or, as we soon realize, her killer.
The mystery is the plot line that carries us through the book, but I would not call this book a mystery. It is much more of a suspense tale of the environment and the community. Spiritual realism permeates the novel, grounded in the Inuit history of story, passed down through generations.
The novel weaves visitations from the dead girl together with the characters' trauma, grief, and self-medication, leaving it ambiguous whether they face literal ghosts or psychological hallucinations. I wondered how much of the apparitions were drug-induced, as everyone is medicated.
I cannot fully recommend A Gift Before Dying. Though I found it an excellently written debut novel, with complex characters and a vivid landscape, it is dark, gritty, violent, depressing. You just have to be in the mood for it and ready to choose it intelligently! It is not a fun, delightful read, though I read it in two days.
AUGUST 2026
SPOILER ALERT. DON'T READ THIS IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW HOW IT ENDS. In the final chapter, as he succumbs to his wounds he suffered during a fight with Pitseolala’s killer, he enters a spiritual iglu. There, he finds Pitseolala who takes his hand and blows out the flames of her lamp. It is a peaceful, spiritual ending that elevates the book to a profound meditation on the Arctic soul.