Set in the turbulent decades of the Vietnam War and the drug and hippie counterculture, The Whale Chaser is a powerful story about Vincent Sansone, the eldest child and only son in a large Italian American family, who comes of age in 1960s Chicago. A constant disappointment to his embittered father—a fishmonger who shows his displeasure with his fists—Vince abruptly flees Chicago. He ends up in Tofino, a picturesque fishing town on the rugged west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia. First he works gutting fish, then is hired by Tofino''s most colorful dealer, Mr. Zig-Zag, and joins the thriving marijuana trade. Ultimately, through his friendship with Ignatius George, an Ahousaht native, he finds his calling as a whale guide. Vince must come to terms with the consequences of his actions as well as his family''s version of la storia segreta, the unspoken story of how his grandfather, like thousands of other Italians and Italian Americans, was interned in a prison camp after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
