It is summer and the Canadian Rockies are on fire.

Fleeing the fallout of a relationship gone wrong, Alan West returns to the small town in the valley where he grew up. There, his grandfather, Cecil, suffers a heart attack and gives him one last task: he must track down the father he's never known, so that Cecil can make his peace.

And so Alan begins his search for the elusive Jack West, a man who skipped town decades earlier and of whom Cecil has always refused to speak. The quest will lead him to Archer, an old American soldier who went AWOL into Canada at the apex of the Vietnam War. Archer has been carrying a heavy burden for many years, and through him Alan learns the stories of Jack, of Cecil, and of Archer's own daughter Linnea - a woman inextricably bound to them all.

Together, at the behest of a dying man, they set off on a reckless journey through the burning mountains and, slowly, they unravel the knots of the past.

What they find will change all of their lives forever.

Selected as one of The Waterstones Eleven, for the best fiction debuts of 2013, Ballistics is a tender, powerful and brilliantly written novel of fathers and sons, vengeance and forgiveness, by the winner of the BBC National Short Story Award.

D. W. Wilson was born and raised in the small towns of the Kootenay Valley, British Columbia. He is the recipient of the University of East Anglia's inaugural Man Booker Prize Scholarship - the most prestigious award available to students in the MA programme. His stories have appeared in literary magazines across Canada, Ireland and the United Kingdom, and 'The Dead Roads' won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2011. He lives in Cambridge. Once You Break a Knuckle, his debut story collection, was published by Bloomsbury in 2012. It was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. His debut novel, Ballistics, was published by Bloomsbury in August 2013.