May There Be No Sadness of Farewell

In Agnes Grant's auspicious fiction debut, she presents a colorful and compelling narrative of three women on the frontier of northern Saskatchewan: Rita, a Cree, whose ancestors were disrupted by the western expansion of European settlement; Hanya, a Ukrainian, who emigrated to western Canada with her husband; and Elizabeth, a German-speaking Mennonite girl, who was engaged to be married when World War I and the Russian Revolution exploded across the land. From the Battleford area of nineteenth-century Saskatchewan through the Great Depression and finally, to a fateful time in 1970 when all three women await death in a hospital room, May There Be No Sadness of Farewell paints a vivid prose portrait of a fascinating period in Canadian history.