Checking Availibility...Description
This collection of stories traces four generations of the Lafreniere family in the fictional small town of Agassiz, Manitoba from the time of the great flood of 1950 to the present. We follow Mika, the matriarch, and her Metis husband Maurice through the uneasiness of their marriage thorgh the years. As their children grow up to pursue their own lives, the frustrations of one generation will collide with the dreams of another, and the past will leave an indellible mark on all that is to come.
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
"In fiction what I long for is a sense of the story's being alive - all hot, rude, contrary, funny, unbearable. You don't get that nearly often enough, but in Sandra Birdsell's work you do get it over and over again, and she has the energy, the faith, the skill, to make her stories overwhelm us."
-Alice Munro
"A remarkable achievement [that] confirms Birdsell's position as one of the best short-story writers in the language."
-Alberto Manguel, Books in Canada
"Each piece is a model of economy; cumulatively, they resonate with the unsparing power of a memory mediated only by art."
-Publishers Weekly
"In twenty-three well-crafted, emotionally resonant stories focusing on nearly every family issue under the sun, Birdsell has woven past and present into a disturbingly honest portrait of small-town and suburban life."
-Philadelphia Inquirer
"Impressive....A masterful storyteller, able to render quiet moments of beauty and grace...."
-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Like Alice Munro, Sandra Birdsell writes of the trials of family, and of the past that clings to us no matter what efforts we make to scour it from our bodies and souls....Sandra Birdsell is here to stay."
-W.P. Kinsella, The Reader
"Birdsell writes with the kind of emotional and psychological honest that distinguishes Munro's work....She has good insight into family relationships and the alternating loyalty, duplicity, jealousy, treachery and compassion of its members....By the final story, we feel we know this family as well as any other in Canadian fiction....Birdsell has us well and truly hooked."
-Globe and Mail
"An infinite pleasure."
-Minnesota Daily
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