Saskatchewan

Photo by weston m on Unsplash

 

The list below contains twelve books set in the land where you can find purple beaches at Hunter Bay, where you can float in Lake Manitou (the "Dead Sea of Canada"), and where Saskatoon berry pie and Regina style pizza are staples of the local cuisine.

Short Stories

📚 Season of Fury and Wonder by Sharon Butala

Writing at the top of her game, Sharon Butala returns to the short story in this astounding new collection. In Butala’s world, the season of fury and wonder is the season of old age. The stories in this book are the stories of women who have had experiences; women who have seen much of life and have felt joy of success and the sting of shortcomings; women who hold opinions and come to conclusions about the lives they’ve lived.

But Sharon Butala gives us more — not only is each story an observation on aging, each story in Season of Fury and Wonder pays tribute to a classic work of literature that has had an impact on Butala’s writing. Among those writers are Raymond Carver, Willa Cather, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, James Joyce, Shirley Jackson, Anton Chekhov, Alan Sillitoe, Ernest Hemingway and Edgar Allan Poe. The result of Butala’s effort is a series of deeply felt tributes to those writers, to their creativity and their power to inspire.

📚 A Song for Nettie Johnson by Gloria Sawai

As Sawai deftly turns over the stones of these people's lives and reveals the squalor, the fear and the unhappiness that lie beneath, she also uncovers that most precious of human qualities - hope.

📚 Mennonites Don't Dance by Darcie Friesen Hossack

This vibrant collection of short fictions explores how families work, how they are torn apart, and, in spite of differences and struggles, brought back together. Darcie Friesen Hossack's stories in Mennonites Don't Dance offer an honest, detailed look into the experiences of children - both young and adult - and their parents and grandparents, exploring generational ties, sins, penance, and redemption.

Taking place primarily on the Canadian prairies, the families in these stories are confronted by the conflict between tradition and change. One story sees a daughter-in-law's urban ideals push and pull against a mother's simple, rural, ways. In another, a daughter raised in the Mennonite tradition tries to break free from her upbringing to escape to the city in search of a better life.

Mystery/Thriller

📚 Deadly Appearances by Gail Bowen

    (A Joanne Kilbourn Mystery #!)

Andy Boychuk is a successful Saskatchewan politician – until one sweltering August afternoon when the party faithful gather at a picnic. All of the key people in Boychuk’s life – family, friends, enemies – are there. Boychuk steps up to the podium to make a speech, takes a sip of water, and drops dead. Joanne Kilbourn, in her début as Canada’s leading amateur sleuth, is soon on the case, delving into Boychuk’s history. What she finds are a Bible college that’s too good to be true, a woman with a horrifying and secret past, and a murderer who’s about to strike again.

Historical Fiction

📚 Under This Unbroken Sky by Shandi Mitchell

Evocative and compelling, rich in imagination and atmosphere, Under This Unbroken Sky is a beautifully wrought debut from a gifted new novelist.

Spring 1938. After nearly two years in prison for the crime of stealing his own grain, Ukrainian immigrant Teodor Mykolayenko is a free man. While he was gone, his wife, Maria; their five children; and his sister, Anna, struggled to survive on the harsh northern Canadian prairie, but now Teodor—a man who has overcome drought, starvation, and Stalin's purges—is determined to make a better life for them. As he tirelessly clears the untamed land, Teodor begins to heal himself and his children. But the family's hopes and newfound happiness are short-lived. Anna's rogue husband, the arrogant and scheming Stefan, unexpectedly returns, stirring up rancor and discord that will end in violence and tragedy.

Under This Unbroken Sky is a mesmerizing tale of love and greed, pride and desperation, that will resonate long after the last page is turned. Shandi Mitchell has woven an unbearably suspenseful story, written in a language of luminous beauty and clarity. Rich with fiery conflict and culminating in a gut-wrenching climax, this is an unforgettably powerful novel from a passionate new voice in contemporary literature.

📚 The Anatomy of Edouard Beaupre by Sarah Kathryn York

This is the story of Edouard Beaupré. He was a circus giant, sideshow strongman, cowboy, family man, and celebrity. He was 8'4", spoke five languages, and led an extraordinary life in many ways. When he died in 1904, at just 23 years old, his body was displayed in storefront windows, and then suddenly vanished. For years, it was submitted to experiments and dissections at the University of Montreal, and the promise to bury Edouard forgotten.

It is also the story of an anatomist with a rare disease, whose only cure is buried in the secrets of Edouard's shrinking corpse. His strange obsession with the giant leads him deeper into Edouard's life, and compels him towards the mystery of the man behind the legend....

Classic

📚 Who Has Seen the Wind by W. O. Mitchell

When W.O. Mitchell died in 1998, he was described as "Canada's best-loved writer." Every commentator agreed that his best—and his best-loved—book was Who Has Seen the Wind. Since it was first published in 1947, this book has sold almost a million copies in Canada.

As we enter the world of four-year-old Brian O'Connal, his father the druggist, his Uncle Sean, his mother, and his formidable Scotch grandmother ("she belshes … a lot"), it soon becomes clear that this is no ordinary book. As we watch Brian grow up, the prairie and its surprising inhabitants like the Ben and Saint Sammy—and the rich variety of small-town characters—become unforgettable. This book will be a delightful surprise for all those who are aware of it, but have never quite got around to reading it, till now.

Contemporary Fiction

📚 Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott

In a moment of self-absorption, Clara Purdy's life takes a sharp left turn when she crashes into a beat-up car carrying an itinerant family of six. The Gage family had been travelling to a new life in Fort McMurray, but bruises on the mother, Lorraine, prove to be late-stage cancer rather than remnants of the accident. Recognizing their need as her responsibility, Clara tries to do the right thing and moves the children, husband and horrible grandmother into her own house--then has to cope with the consequences of practical goodness.

As Lorraine walks the borders of death, Clara expands into life, finding purpose, energy and unexpected love amidst the hard, unaccustomed work of sharing her days. But the burden is not Clara's alone: Lorraine's children must cope with divided loyalties and Lorraine must live with her growing, unpayable debt to Clara--and the feeling that Clara has taken her place.

What, exactly, does it mean to be good? When is sacrifice merely selfishness? What do we owe in this life and what do we deserve? Marina Endicott looks at life and death through the compassionate lens of a born novelist: being good, being at fault, and finding some balance on the precipice.

📚 Cool Water (aka Juliet in August) by Dianne Warren

Juliet, Saskatchewan, is a blink-of-an-eye kind of town — the welcome sign announces a population of 1,011 people — and it’s easy to imagine that nothing happens on its hot and dusty streets. Situated on the edge of the Little Snake sand hills, Juliet and its inhabitants are caught in limbo between a century — old promise of prosperity and whatever lies ahead.

But the heart of the town beats in the rich and overlapping stories of its people: the foundling who now owns the farm his adoptive family left him; the pregnant teenager and her mother, planning a fairytale wedding; a shy couple, well beyond middle age, struggling with the recognition of their feelings for one another; a camel named Antoinette; and the ubiquitous wind and sand that forever shift the landscape. Their stories bring the prairie desert and the town of Juliet to vivid and enduring life.

This wonderfully entertaining, witty and deeply felt novel brims with forgiveness as its flawed people stumble towards the future.

Autobiography/Memoir

📚 Small Beneath the Sky: A Prairie Memoir by Lorna Crozier

A volume of poignant recollections by one of Canada's most celebrated poets, Small Beneath the Sky is a tender, unsparing portrait of a family and a place.

Lorna Crozier vividly depicts her hometown of Swift Current, with its one main street, two high schools, and three beer parlors-where her father spent most of his evenings. She writes unflinchingly about the grief and shame caused by poverty and alcoholism. At the heart of the book is Crozier's fierce love for her mother, Peggy. The narratives of daily life-sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking-are interspersed with prose poems. Lorna Crozier approaches the past with a tactile sense of discovery, tracing her beginnings with a poet's precision and an open heart.

Horror

📚 Ghost Stories of Saskatchewan by Jo-Anne Christensen

Alongside its golden wheat fields and shimmering northern laskes, Saskatchewan holds a rich folkloric collection of ghost stories; until now, no one has paid much atention to these tales.

Geographically, they range from Kenosee Lake, where the resident ghost of a local dance hall had strong objections to renovations, to Shell Lake, where the identity of a mass-murderer was revealed to a group of teenagers through a Ouija board.

In nature, they vary from charming spirits haunting a community arts centre to the menacing presence that drove a Rockglen family to burn their home to the ground.

This eerie collection showcases Saskatchewan's most intriguing ghost stories: accounts of misty apparitions, unexplained noises, violent poltergeists, and startling premonitions. Together, the stories create a fascinating addition to the province's colourful history and disprove the notion that for there to be ghosts, there must be traditional old world settings. Saskatchewan's spirits haunt its weathered prairie farm homes and nondescript suburban bungalows, its overgrown cemeteries and tidy small-town churches, its hospitals and museums, and its very landscape.

It's proven in these pages: you needn't look far to find a ghost in the haunted province of Saskatchewan!

YA

📚 Song of the Sword by Edward Willett

    (The Shards of Excalibur #1)

What if it’s all true, and not a fairy tale at all?

Everyone knows the legends of King Arthur, the Round Table, and the powerful and noble wizard Merlin. But what if those so-called legends are real historical facts, only someone has carefully rearranged that history?

Ariane’s life is already pretty difficult when she starts to hear the singing. Her mother disappeared, she’s trying to get used to living with her aunt after several foster homes, and she’s taking grief from the “in” girls at school. She’s been having strange dreams involving swords and knights and battles, and lately things get really weird whenever she touches water. And NOW, an invisible someone, somewhere, is singing to her.

Before long, Ariane’s met the famed Lady of the Lake, down a staircase in the middle of Wascana Lake, and learned that she’s related. And she’s been set, with her new best friend Wally Knight, on a dangerous mission that pits her against otherworldly forces. Can she figure out what it all means, much less survive the challenge?