The narrative sustains a fast pace as Jens and his brother Daniel tackle a number of tough situations over the course of a long weekend. “People start out in motion and continue in motion, physical and emotional, throughout the story.” Certainly, there is a lot of movement in Drive. “In my books there’s a strong forward movement,” she says. There is also, in both the brothers, sexual drive, and the drive of ambition.

The story involves different kinds of drive: there is the drive through southern Manitoba that Jens Friesen, the 18-year-old protagonist, takes with his younger brother in a borrowed truck. She might – if she found the right avenue for one, but she says “a novel requires so much commitment by the writer that you have to think of things that are compelling to you.” Compelling is a word Wieler uses a lot in our conversation, which is fitting, given that the root of the word translates into the title of her new novel, Drive, published this fall by Groundwood Books. Asked if she would create a female protagonist, she seems to hesitate. But her relationship with her characters is far from clinical writing them is a process of close engagement.

Having grown up in a house without males (her father left when she was six, and she had no brothers), Wieler developed a kind of scientific interest in them as psychological subjects. “They’re endlessly fascinating,” she says over the phone from her home in Winnipeg. Having placed them at the centre of all six of her novels for young adults, Diana Wieler remains preoccupied with teenage males.

Ranvan by Diana Wieler