The Lost Man

The Lost Man is a full-length memoir by the Canadian author Don Gillmor, originally published as To the River: Losing My Brother, which won the Governor General's Literary Award. In December 2015, the author's younger brother David—a gifted musician who drifted from band to band—vanished in Whitehorse, a small city in northern Canada. His truck and cowboy hat were found by the Yukon River, and family, friends and colleagues each had their own theories about the "disappearance": some said he had gone away, some suspected foul play, and more believed that this forty-eight-year-old man, who had only just begun to live a regular daytime life, had ended his life in the river. In the spring of 2016, Gillmor travelled to Whitehorse to retrace his brother's final days; just as he was preparing to paddle a canoe down the Yukon River in search of clues along the waterway, David's body was found. And so the downstream canoe journey became a voyage of both searching and farewell. As the author recounts the boyhood the two brothers shared, he visits the places his brother once lived and interviews those who knew him, drawing widely on sociology, psychology and suicidology in an attempt to answer a question that remains unanswered: why would a man who seemed to be doing well choose to leave? The book also opens out into reflections on middle-aged men in North America, meaninglessness and boredom, family and loss. The prose is calm and restrained, the pain unmistakable: a sincere work about love and loss.