Eyebright

Set between the forests of British Columbia and the Saskatchewan prairies, Eyebright is a searing debut about art, survival, and the inseparable wounds we carry in our bodies, our families, and the land. What do we owe the people we love? What do we owe the places that made us?

Set in the long shadow of logging towns and paper mills, Eyebright follows Evie, a painter trying to both fuel and escape her life through art. Evie’s interior world twirls through a life marked by consequence: her mother’s willful blindness to abuse and racism, her sister’s addiction, her own destruction, her son’s illness due to the environment they live in, and her hopeful love and healing. Through it all, painting grounds and keeps her, allowing her escape and process, but is the art why she is still living, or is it keeping her from living her life?

Moving between ecological grief and the intimate betrayals of family, this novel explores the cost of seeing clearly and the courage it takes to refuse the stories others have written for you. Evie’s fierce, searching consciousness animates every page as she reckons with motherhood, desire, responsibility, and the possibility of choosing a life beyond expectation.

In the tradition of writers like Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Louise Erdrich, Auger writes the natural world not as backdrop but as living presence: exploited and enduring, a source of both grief and belonging. Her prose is incantatory, precise, and alive with startling beauty.

A stellar debut from a bright new voice, Eyebright asks how Indigenous women hold space for healing in a world that insists on their erasure.