Long Change examines the high-stakes world of oil through the life and loves of one man.


Fleeing his violent, Pentecostal father, as well as a crime of his own, fifteen-year-old Ritt Devlin leaves Texas in the early 1950s, heads north, and soon finds work on an oil rig on the outskirts of Medicine Hat. By his early twenties, he's the head of his own oil company.
     Spanning almost seventy years, Long Change examines the high-stakes world of oil through the life and loves of one man, following the geology and politics of the industry from Texas to the Canadian oil patch, to Africa, Asia, and the Arctic, from idealism and avarice to violence and delusion.
     Already one of Canada's most accomplished journalists, author Don Gillmor brings us an intimate, unforgettable story of industry and humanity.  • "Muscular and gritty, yet steeped in the intimate strata of the human heart." --Will Ferguson, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of 419
 • "An ambitious book. . . . You can allow yourself to be pulled from page to page, confident that you won't be kept waiting for a payoff." --The Globe and Mail
 • "Long Change . . . starts with a bang. . . . [It] is an intimate epic, a tightly focused personal narrative set against one of the most powerful economic forces of the twentieth century. . . . Long Change is a window into a world which few readers will have really considered, a deeply embedded critique . . . of the North American myth of success, a warning of the shaky ground where money overshadows and subverts passion, the quicksand where dreams slowly suffocate, long before the bullets start to fly." --National Post