Sophie Ware, weary of noncommittal affairs, accepts a marriage proposal from Alexander Bresnyachuk, a poor uneducated Ukrainian, knowing that her husband-to-be-only wants her for her land

Getting Married in Buffalo Jump

Literature & Fiction

Haley, Susan

United States

Dutton Adult

Nest of Singing Birds

Paperjacks

Fresh out of college and reeling from the failure of a marriage that had barely even begun, Marcus takes a teaching job in a tiny northern-Canadian native community. While struggling to grasp his own predicament, Marcus finds himself entangled in much larger community tragediesthe suicide of an aging priest and the death of two young students from exposure. But it is his discovery of the writings of Émile Petitota controversial nineteenth-century missionary Oblate priest, linguist and ‘explorer’which finally threatens to unhinge Marcus, launching him on an obsessive quest for answers. In this novel, Susan Haley explores the troubled life and dubious claims of Father Petitot, whose fifteen years beneath the Arctic Circle were punctuated by scandal, delusional behaviour and episodes of outright madness and paranoiaproblems which caused him to be shuffled from mission to mission, temporary excommunication and even forcibly hospitalized by the bishop. Haley’s binocular approach ruptures the normal historical perspective as she attempts to depict Petitot in all his complexity, both through the eyes of his Inuit and Cree contemporaries and through those of Marcus, who sifts through the written records of one man’s life in search for the truth about us all.

Petitot

Literary

Gaspereau Pr

In Susan Haley's sixth novel, Maggie Ribbinski returns with her daughters (and without their father) to the small Nova Scotia resort town where she was raised. Soon after moving into her late mother's house, Maggie has a chance encounter with a crush from her teenage years. Tom and his band of theatre friends quickly infiltrate Maggie's brittle relationship with her daughters, turning it on its head. In a summer of complicated and unconventional relationships, Maggie is forced to redefine her notions of family. Haley shows an excellent capacity for handling her characters' quirks, pushing the borders of familial, heterosexual and homosexual relationships to locate a tenuous middle ground that ultimately comes closer to reality than any of the conventions. With a remarkable ear for both dialogue and thought, Haley has written a novel that is truly engaging. A complex and humorous novel about love and family in a Nova Scotia resort town.

Maggie's Family

Gaspereau Press

The Murder of Medicine Bear is the story of an Alberta river and of the people who live near its banks. In her most ambitious work to date, Haley interweaves the lives of three generations of natives and whites. Both communities reside in the shadow of an ever-looming mega-project which threatens to dam the river and either save or destroy a way of life, depending on your perspective. At the centre of the novel is the unexpected reunion of an eccentric young band chief, Tim Steen, with his sister, Marina, from whom he was estranged as a child after the brutal murder of their mother. Moving forward and backward in time, Haley paints a compassionate portrait of reservation life and of the complex, sometimes tragic interrelationships between whites and natives.

The Murder of Medicine Bear