Checking Availibility...Description
The Russlander reaches across time and space to tell a compelling story of love and hardship. Katya Vogt, now an old woman living in Winnipeg, recollects her early childhood years as a young Mennonite in southern Russia during the years leading up to the First World War and the Russian Revolution. Dealing with a rich tapestry of lives, relationships and unstable politics, Russlander is a poignant and original novel with a large cast of dramatic figures.
About this Author
Sandra Birdsell was born in Manitoba and, until recently, has spent most of her life in Winnipeg. Her first novel, The Missing Child (1989), won the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her second novel, The Chrome Suite (1992), and her most recent collection of short fiction, The Two-Headed Calf (1997), were both shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Fiction. Her two previous short story collections, Night Travellers and Ladies of the House, were reissued in 1987 as Agassiz Stories. Her most recent novel, The Russländer (2001), won the Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction, the Saskatchewan Book Award for Book of the Year, and the Regina Book Award, and was a finalist for the Giller Prize.
Sandra Birdsell's fiction has been anthologized and has appeared in literary journals and Saturday Night magazine.
She lives in Regina.
Reviews
"It is a compassionate, well-developed family story of love, loyalty, faith, hate, loss and betrayal....It is a story that could be told by any family displaced by war and revolution."
-Winnipeg Free Press
"With her formidable gifts for psychological observation and her uncanny details of daily life a century ago, Birdsell weaves a place as important as any in our literature. By showing how power is often foisted upon us from an outside world, The Russländer illuminates, with an artistic glow of the first rank, the intimate certainty that evil will not dominate kindness, truth, or love."
-Jury Citation for the Giller Prize
"Entrancing....Birdsell has outdone herself....There is a temptation to quote The Russländer in full. It's that good a novel."
-National Post
"Realistic, dramatic, dense....The Russländer is profound."
-Quill & Quire (starred review)
"Masterful....She weaves historical fact and domestic detail into a meticulous portrait of a tightly knit community driven to the brink of existence....It's impossible not to see Katya and her family in the faces of the fleeing refugees as world events once again sweep innocent people into a maelstrom."
-Ottawa Citizen
"Compelling....We think not so much of the story as the process of memory and reflection, the ability of language to convey a remembered reality."
-Toronto Star
"Birdsell has reached deep for her story, and that of countless immigrants to a new land, and come up with treasure as precious as that silver, two-handled cup that serves as a totem throughout this novel about remembrance and redemption."
-Hamilton Spectator
"Superb."
-Edmonton Journal
"An important book....It shows how easily we can destroy our world, but also that we have the ability to rebuild it."
-Globe and Mail
"I think it's both beautiful and brave, and very, very moving."
-Ann Jansen, CBC Radio
"[Birdsell] documents in chilling, unsentimental prose man's unspeakable capacity for cruelty towards his fellow man....As relevant as today's headlines."
-Maclean's
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