Anne Cameron

This novel focuses on five women from diverse backgrounds who find common ground in the dance halls of the Klondike Goldrush. From the author of "The Journey" and "Child of Her People," another unusual and enlightening approach to the frontier tale.

This new novel by the bestselling writer Anne Cameron is the story of two women who seem similar but are very different: Cedar Campbell and her mother Kate. Cedar comes into the world a few months after her parents' shotgun wedding and grows up with her father, who is violent and adulterous, and with Kate, who is far too accommodating and forgiving. By the time Cedar is ten years old she's spending most of her time at a neighbour's farm, finding solace in the animals and the straightforward hard work, and after she finishes high school she moves to the farm permanently. Kate is disappointed and jealous, seeing Cedar's choice as a defection or a rebuke, and Cedar is determined to keep moving, to be her own person and to avoid being haunted by past horrors. Through the years, from the time Kate is a young woman to the time Cedar is a middle-aged one, both women must grapple with the powerful and sometimes contradictory forces of love, anger, fear and forgiveness--each in her own way, in her own life.

In 2003, Rachel Cusk published A Life's Work, a provocative and often startlingly funny memoir about the cataclysm of motherhood. Widely acclaimed, the book started hundreds of arguments that continue to this day. Now, in her most personal and relevant book to date, Cusk explores divorce's tremendous impact on the lives of women. An unflinching chronicle of Cusk's own recent separation and the upheaval that followed―"a jigsaw dismantled"―it is also a vivid study of divorce's complex place in our society. "Aftermath" originally signified a second harvest, and in this book, unlike any other written on the subject, Cusk discovers opportunity as well as pain. With candor as fearless as it is affecting, Rachel Cusk maps a transformative chapter of her life with an acuity and wit that will help us understand our own.

A young brother and sister in the village of Sliammon must go out after dark to fetch their grandmother, and even though they are good children, they are caught by The One Who Takes Bad Children. It is up to the brother and sister to free themselves and all the other children by doing what they have been taught: stay calm, pay attention, and use everything you can find around you. An elder of the Sliammon people, Sue Pielle is one of the most respected story tellers in British Columbia. She works with the child development centre at Sliammon and in the Sliammon language and cultural programme at James Thompson School. Anne Cameron is a well known Canadian writer and an neighbour of Sue Pielle.