Cherry Picking in the Okanagan – Author Q&A by Andrew Shephard
Sorry if this appears rude, but why would I want to read about picking cherries? Fair question. Well, the book is not a guide to picking cherries, but there is a lot of fruit in it. And water. It’s a novel set in a camp for migrant fruit pickers beside Lake Okanagan in Canada. The workers are a mixed bunch of French Canadians, US draft dodgers, First Nation people, and Indians from India. A couple of English students, Lionel and Walker, get work there in the summer of 1976. They take a fancy to three young French Canadian women, two of whom are sisters. Four decades later, Lionel has become a senior politician and Claudette, the younger of the sisters, accuses Lionel of rape. Why did you choose the Okanagan Valley for the setting? Travelling through Canada in the 1970s I camped for the night in small place called Oyama. The next morning, there were two people already hitching at the highway junction so I went into a café for breakfast. I asked if anyone knew where I could get wor...