Path of Lucas: The Journey He Endured
Susanne Bellefeuille · Canada, 2015 (set from the 1950s onward, rural Ontario) · Non-African prose · WAEC set text 2026–2030
Why it is on the list
The other non-African prose text. Family, faith, sacrifice, and a father talking his daughter back toward life.
Setting
Farm country near Alexandria, Ontario, and a hospital room in the present.
The story
- The present: Lucy is driving through fog to visit her father when another car hits her. She is pulled from the wreck with severe head trauma. Doctors give her little hope.
- Lucas, her father, sits beside the bed and talks. He does not accept the twenty-four-hour sentence. The talking is the novel: he tells her the life that made him, so that she has something to come back to.
- The past: 1950s farm life, a first car, meeting the girl who will be Lucy’s mother, the choices between a private dream and keeping a family standing.
- Work, marriage, ageing parents, children, a career step that would pull him away from home — each chapter is a decision, not just an event.
- The “path” is the one he walked so that she could walk hers. Whether she wakes is the present tense hanging over every memory.
Characters
- Lucas
- Father, husband, son, the man telling the story. Endurance is his subject and his method.
- Lucy
- Daughter, silent listener in a hospital bed, and the “eye” the book is offered through.
- Lucas’s wife
- The girl in the Studebaker years, then the partner the sacrifices were made with and for.
- Mark
- Lucy’s husband, waiting with the family.
Themes
- A parent’s love as a story told against death.
- Duty to family versus personal ambition.
- Faith and purpose in ordinary Canadian farm life.
- Memory as a way of keeping someone in the world.
In the exam
- Keep the two times clear: hospital now, farm then. Mixing them without signalling costs marks.
- This is not a war novel and not To Kill a Mockingbird. Write about family, choice and endurance, not racism.
- “Journey” in the title is moral as well as biographical. Say what he endured, and what it cost.