Julian Fontaine is a child of the oil industry. Throughout the Seventies, his father works as a roughneck and eventually a manager on the rigs in western Canada, and Julian fantasizes about the two of them working together some day. But when his father dies in an accident in 1981, Julian’s life veers in another direction. It is not until two decades later that he follows his original dream and begins a job in the oil industry, not as a labourer like his father but as a publicist in the Calgary office of a company called Petrolia International.

In the spring of 2003, with the Iraq war erupting in the background, Julian is assigned to defuse the tensions between Petrolia and a group of aboriginal protestors who have set up a blockade near his old home town. As he returns to the place of his childhood, a landscape charged with memories of his father, Julian makes a discovery that causes him to question everything about his past. This is only the beginning of a harrowing journey in which he comes to realize how deeply his life has been affected by the world's most volatile commodity.

Exhaust is a free-wheeling, high octane novel of globalization, aboriginal resistance, and the ethics of consumer society, but it is also a devastating personal story of one family's gradual disintegration, and a poignant fable about a boy obsessed with his dead father's car.

In the current era of the oil presidency, the Iraq conflict, global warming, and another impending world energy crisis, Exhaust is quintessentially a novel of our time.