Wild Rose

Sharon Butala, known for both her fiction and her literary nonfiction, turns to the novel with this story set on the prairies. Its cast spans homesteading farmers and ranch hands, women who have fallen from respectability alongside genteel ladies, and the settlers and Indigenous people who share the land. The book is crowded with characters from every rung of frontier society.

The opening chapter establishes the situation. Sophie Hippolyte's husband, Pierre, has been away for three days when a lone rider comes toward their homestead cabin in southwest Saskatchewan during the 1880s. The tension of that approach carries the chapter.