Our June Author of the Month: ANTHONY BIDULKA

Anthony Bidulka has dedicated his career to writing traditional genre novels in an untraditional way, developing a body of work that often features his Saskatchewan roots and underrepresented, diverse main characters. He tells serious stories in accessible, entertaining, often humorous ways. Bidulka’s books have been shortlisted for and won numerous awards including the Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Saskatchewan Book Award. Going to Beautiful won the Crime Writers of Canada Award for Best Crime Novel and the Independent Publisher Book Award as the Canada West Best Fiction Gold Medalist. He received the Ukrainian Canadian Congress Nation Builders Award and was named, along with his husband Herb, Saskatoon Citizen of the Year. For his promotion of Saskatchewan through his writing, co-founding Camp fYrefly Saskatchewan (a leadership retreat for gender and sexually diverse and allied youth), and widespread volunteer and philanthropic efforts in the community, Anthony was honoured by the selection of a two-part park in Saskatoon named Bidulka Park and Bidulka Park North.

In Homes Fires Burn, the conclusion of the award-winning Merry Bell trilogy, a celebrated philanthropist is found slumped against his car, frozen to death. PI Merry Bell is hired by his son, country music star Evan Whatley, to find out the truth behind what really happened on that desolate stretch of road. As Merry’s investigation uncovers old wounds which never healed, her own are revealed as she confronts her pre-transition past and questions the boundaries of family and friendship. 

A book launch event on June 12 for Home Fires Burn will be hosted at the Glen at Crossmount.

Our May Author of the Month: FREDRIK BACKMAN

Our April Author of the Month: LEANNE BETASAMOSAKE SIMPSON

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, musician, and member of Alderville First Nation. She is the author of seven books, including the recent non-fiction A Short History of the Blockade, and the acclaimed novel Noopiming: A Cure for White Ladies. 

In her new book, Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead, she takes a revolutionary look at that most elemental force, water, and suggests a powerful path for the future. She'll be appearing live at our store in Winnipeg to discuss her work with Shelagh Rogers on Tuesday April 29 at a special, livestreamed event.

For years, Simpson took solace in skiing—in all kinds of weather across all forms of terrain, often following the trail beside a beloved creek near her home. Recently, as she skied this path and meditated on our world’s uncertainty, environmental devastation, rising authoritarianism and  ongoing social injustice, her mind turned to the water in the creek, the ice beneath her feet, and an elemental question: What might it mean to truly listen to water? To know water? To exist with and alongside water? So began her quest to discover, understand and trace the  historical and cultural interactions of Indigenous peoples with water in all its forms. Soon she began to see how a “Theory of Water” might lead to a radical rethinking of relationships between beings and forces in the world today.

In this inventive work, Simpson artfully weaves Nishnaabeg story and tradition with her own deep thinking and lived experience—and offers a vision of water as a catalyst for radical transformation, capable of birthing a new world.

Our March Author of the Month: KAREN RUSSELL

Karen Russell is the author of six works of fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has received two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane prize, the 2024 Mary McCarthy Award, and was selected for the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” prize and The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list (She is now decisively
over 40). 

Her new book, The Antidote, opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a “Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble  scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

Russell’s novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.