Liberty Street

From the Governor General’s Award¬–winning author of Cool Water, “a story of compassion, redemption and of coming to terms with one’s past told with intelligence, humour and wit” (Winnipeg Free Press).

When sharp-edged Frances Moon and her long-time partner encounter a funeral procession that brings traffic to a halt, she finds herself blurting out the barest thread of a story that she never intended to share. The reverberations drive her back to the past and her mother’s old rental property, the lone house in a failed subdivision called Liberty Street.

There, memories are ghosts: Frances’s mother on her way to Nashville to become a country singer; her father determined to run his farm despite his failing eyesight; the town’s bad apple, Dooley Sullivan; a string of renters including the December bride, Esme Bigalow, and a man who met a tragic end, Silas Chance.

When a domestic mishap and a torrential hailstorm send Frances to the questionable safety of an eccentric neighbour’s kitchen, she learns just how unreliable memory is, and that she was not the only one whose life after Elliot, Saskatchewan, was determined by half-truths and bad decisions.

With depth, insight and the subtle humour for which she is known, Dianne Warren gives us an engrossing and touching novel about disappointment, anger and the redemptive power of kindness.