Children
of the Day
A novel
Random House Canada, 2005
Their meeting was a near-fatal accident, but from the moment that Oliver Vandal, driving cab in Winnipeg, almost ran Sara Vogt down, the lives of these unlikely lovers have been sometimes rudely, sometimes gloriously intertwined. Sandra Birdsell's emotionally charged and brilliantly observed novel unfolds over the course of a single day in June 1953, when Sara refuses to come down to breakfast, chasing her husband out of the house and leaving their children to fend for themselves. If she and her family are to safely navigate the day, they'll need luck or divine intervention. They'll also need Sara and Oliver to confront their marital lies, their true desires and the tragic experiences that shaped them.
Praise for Children of the Day
"The reader is drawn on by sheer pleasure in the writing and an increasing connectedness to the Vandals. We must know what happens to these people. By the end, with all the major players gathered together in an extraordinary tragicomic climax, this reader for one was shouting from the sidelines."
-Quill and Quire (starred review)
"There's nary a false note in Children of the Day… of stories such as this was the history of the prairies woven, one family at a time. Skillful and satisfying."
-Montreal Gazette
"Birdsell's skill at tapping the mindset of Sara and Oliver and the various Vandal children is masterful… The uncanny, precise detailing of daily life highlights the tight seal of tension that clings to every moment…. Children of the Day contains a compelling, palpable loveliness. Birdsell's strength as a storyteller is her ability to excavate hope from ruin."
-Toronto Star
"An earthy, vivid portrait of a family coping with the messy business of life. It's also a brilliant portrait of a country in the making."
-Time
"By zeroing in on one couple, one family, one day, Birdsell is able to deal with decades of history and loss in a haunting portrait both human and geographical. A stunning portrait… the characters are brilliantly drawn and achingly real."
-The National Post
"Utterly gripping... a historical novel that reminds us how the past, and especially the violent past, can never be repressed."
-The Globe and Mail
"In this novel, Sandra Birdsell charts with a sure hand the lives of individuals struggling with both change and history on the plains of Manitoba. It is detailed and eloquent and deeply compassionate."
-Alistair MacLeod, author of No Great Mischief
"With one family and in the course of a single day, Birdsell beautifully illuminates the age-old tensions between and within the Mennonites and the Metis of Manitoba. I love the defiant yet vulnerable voices of the Vandal girls, who are caught in the centre of their parents' strife."
-Miriam Toews, author of A Complicated Kindness
"Birdsell's new novel is a wonderful book, a passionately intimate family drama that also cunningly, magically reflects the history of western Canada. Children of the Day is a remarkable achievement on both counts."
-Guy Vanderhaeghe, author of The Last Crossing
Katya
A novel
Milkweed Editions, 2004
(published
in Canada as The Russländer)
Praise
for Katya
"This historical novel juxtaposes the serenity and nurturing
qualities of family, community, and nature with the violence and wanton destruction
of an anarchistic peasant revolution. Though Katya is an adolescent at the
time of the events, the reader moves back and forth through time and space
via her eyes. In this compelling, beautifully descriptive novel, nature is
a vital allegory for beauty, accomplishment, unity, and purpose; conversely,
in the hands of marauding usurpers, it becomes a metaphor for mayhem, devastation,
and death. Recommended for all collections."
-Sofia
A. Tangalos, The Library Journal
The
Russländer
A novel
Emblem Editions, McClelland & Stewart, 2002
McClelland & Stewart, 2001
Finalist
for The Giller Prize
Book of the Year, Saskatchewan Book Awards
City of Regina Book of the Year
Fiction Award of the year, Saskatchewan Book Awards
Jury Citation for Giller Prize: "Sandra Birdsell's The Russländer evokes with artistic nobility the daily life among a Mennonite community in Russia at the beginning of the first world war, a war that tragically consumes their ordinary expectations and their lives in the cheap excesses and banality of murder. With her formidable gifts for psychological observation and her uncanny details of daily life a century ago, Birdsell weaves a place as important as any in our literature. By showing how power is often foisted upon us from an outside world, The Russländer illuminates, with an artistic glow of the first rank, the intimate certainty that evil will not dominate kindness, truth, or love."
Katherine (Katya) Vogt is now an old woman living in Winnipeg, but the story of how she and her family came to Canada begins in Russia in 1910, on a wealthy Mennonite estate. Here they lived in a world bounded by the prosperity of their landlords and by the poverty and disgruntlement of the Russian workers who toil on the estate. But in the wake of the First World War, the tensions engulfing the country begin to intrude on the community, leading to an unspeakable act of violence. In the aftermath of that violence, and in the difficult years that follow, Katya tries to come to terms with the terrible events that befell her and her family. In lucid, spellbinding prose, Birdsell vividly evokes time and place, and the unease that existed in a country on the brink of revolutionary change. The Russländer is a powerful and moving story of ordinary people who lived through extraordinary times.
Praise
for The Russländer
"Birdsell has outdone herself. There is temptation to
quote The Russländer in full. It's that good a novel."
-National Post
"She (Birdsell) has reached deep for her story, and that of countless
immigrants to a new land, and come up with treasure as precious as that silver,
two-handled cup that serves as a totem throughout this novel ..."
-Hamilton Spectator
"... a
painstaking
labour of love and devotion ..."
-The Globe and Mail
"The Russländer is profound. Birdsell s book bears careful witness
to not only the settling of many Canadian prairie farms, but to cultural and
personal endurance within a diverse nation."
-Quill and Quire (star review)
"The Russländer ... is exquisitely written. It never labours
a point, it carries us like the wind in and about the world she chooses to
describe. There isn't a clumsy word in it."
-Hamilton Examiner
"... Sandra Birdsell probably couldn't have foreseen she was writing
a book that can be described as timely.... Birdsell's story of two Mennonite
families victimized by conflict speaks as eloquently of today's strife as
it does of past struggles."
-Ottawa Citizen
"The Russländer ... is a novel full of inventive richness, which
resists all efforts to be put aside. Birdsell has transformed scattered fragments
of family history into the burnished gold of fiction."
-The London Free Press
The
Town That Floated Away
A children's novel
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 1997
Illustrations by Helen Flook
Best
Book for Children, Saskatchewan Book Awards
Nominated for the Red Cedar Award
Nominated for the Silver Birch Award
Virginia Potts finally has her Preposterously Protective Parents foiled. She's won the Spring Break Draw. The prize: one trip to St. Boniface. Sure, she and her best friend, Richard Birdoletto, um, cheated to make sure that Virginia won--but never mind. She can't wait to get away from home.
But then, strange things begin to happen.
Cats start standing on rooftops and refuse to come down. Madame Galosh arrives and starts handing out free lemonade. Suddenly the town is filled with strange sounds as in every house, a toilet is flushed, Whoosh! Whoosh! And then...
Well, then the town of Wellington floats away and Virginia Potts is left behind.
Praise
for The Town that Floated Away
"A silly, soggy, good story. This is a funny, Canadian-style romp
in a charming, hilarious and improbably adventure."
-The Regina Sun
"Birdsell's
new juvenile book could become a classic. A humorous inventive tale....
Birdsell's slightly wacky sense of humour is sure to appeal to her juvenile
readers."
-Helen Norrie, Winnipeg Free Press
"With
well measured dollops of child centered humour, outrageous circumstance, and
universal emotion, Birdsell treats us to a cast of lovable characters who
lived out their lives in a world that drifts away right under their noses
and feet. This zany book is a testament to an author who keenly understands
her readers. Ms. Birdsell hits them (and us) directly in the jugular
which in this instance originates in the funny bone. No small feat, in itself,
The Town That Floated Away is a gem."
-Borderviews
The
Two-Headed Calf
Short stories
McClelland & Stewart, 1997
Finalist
for Governor General's Award for fiction
Book of the Year Award, Saskatchewan Book Awards
City of Regina Book of the Year
A dazzling collection of short stories that juxtapose cultures and generations
with the often conflicted yearnings of the human heart.
In the title story, a young illegitimate girl begins to understand the double-edged nature of the world. In another, a woman returns to her Winnipeg home and finds herself once again surrounded by memories and drawn in by the encroaching need of those society has left behind. An elderly retired couple grapple with which side of the truth they can understand on a long drive to Saskatoon where their granddaughter will go on trial for her part in a murder. The relationship between a divorced woman and her teenage daughter is brilliantly portrayed as the girl's ache for independence leads her into a strange, potentially dangerous situation. Set some time between two wars in farming country, the final story recalls the tragic tale of twins who remain on the fixed course of middle-aged bachelorhood until a young woman's attentions instil a poignant hope, and their lives change irrevocably.
Set in urban and rural Manitoba, these nine beautifully rendered stories draw on both the past and the present at they explore the dislocations that occur between cultures and generations, and between the conflicting aspects of ourselves and our yearnings.
Praise
for The Two-Headed Calf
Finalist for the Governor General's Award for Fiction
"Like Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro and Carol Shields, Ms. Birdsell
has a talent for capturing the ebb and flow of the deeply personal and, by
definition, domestic relationship: she looks at a neighbourhood with the roofs
removed."
-The Ottawa Citizen
"With precise and crystalline writing she peels away the conflicting
layers of her characters until they stand bold and vibrant, naked against
their environment."
-Uptown, Winnipeg
"Sandra Birdsell explores human beings with intelligence, sensitivity,
and wit. And there s a wonderful clarity to her stories that fixes them in
the mind and makes the imagination return to them."
-Calgary Herald
"These stories wear their words like catsuits, fitted to perfection....
deceptively simple prose."
-Telegraph-Journal
"In Birdsell's beautiful understated prose, characters move through uncharted
landscapes with compasses set."
-Georgia Straight
"Moments of lyric insight, the dailiness of our days, a hunger for meaning:
these things struggle against each other like the impulses of the two brains
of the calf ... the narrative holds them in a taut and satisfying balance."
-Montreal Gazette
"(Readers) will recognize the sinuous prose and the yearning characters,
the tenebrous themes and graphic images. This is vintage Birdsell."
-The Globe and Mail
"In these stories, history rises up with a power that lifted the hairs
on my arms ..."
-The Vancouver Sun
These stories "made me recall a great American critic's comment about
the inspired Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai: When he is at his best, he
is the best."
-The Edmonton Journal
"... elegantly constructed stories, both humorous and horrifying ..."
-Maclean's
The
Chrome Suite
A novel
Emblem Editions, McClelland & Stewart, 2002
Virago
Press, 1994
McClelland & Stewart 1992
Finalist for the Governor General's Award for Fiction
MacNally Robinson Book of the Year
Set in Manitoba, the Chrome Suite reaches back nearly four decades into the life of present-day scriptwriter Amy Barber and, layer by layer, uncovers the effects of loss and absence, and of the inadvertent damage that can be done within the most well-meaning of families.
Amy, now in her forties, reconstructs the events that brought her to where she is today. The narrative moves from a small Manitoba town during on extraordinarily hot summer at the close of the 1950s when the death of Amy's sister changes everything, to the 1960s and the 1970s when Amy marries, goes to live in the city, and begins to have reason to fear for her young son.
Birdsell's haunting, almost tactile evocation of the dangerous territory of the past is infused with an uneasy nostalgia. And the story of Amy Barber, her parents, Margaret and Timothy, her brother, Mel, and sister, Jill, is paralleled by the present day as Amy travels by car from Toronto to Winnipeg with her younger lover, Piotr, a Polish filmmaker. This is a journey shadowed by the future and by the disturbing presence of a hitchhiker.
The Chrome Suite is an emotionally charged novel of darkness and light. Sandra Birdsell's unforgettable characters are portrayed as complex, fallible beings and, through them, she explores the private, sometimes cruel realm of relationships and the universal quest for an often elusive self-acceptance.
Vividly descriptive, darkly humorous, erotic, and moving.
Praise
for The Chrome Suite
Finalist for the Governor General's Award for Fiction
"As Margaret Atwood captured the tensions that divide young girls in
Cat's Eye, so Birdsell explores the tensions--sexual, emotional, territorial--that
fill Amy Barber's house.... The Chrome Suite seems to have been
written from some deep, dark well of inspiration."
-Books in Canada
"Birdsell's voice is ... rich with surprise and guileless wit.... (She)
deftly depicts four decades of an aimless, refreshingly unselfconscious life."
-New York Times Book Review
"Birdsell tightly controls the rich detail, the intense emotions of her
story.... I celebrate the publication of this extraordinary novel....
As good as it gets. ... a miraculous novel."
-Globe and Mail
"A masterful new novel, which places (Birdsell) among the best Canadian
writers today."
-Montreal Gazette
"The human landscape and the complexities of relationships ring true.
Birdsell's ability to enter the hearts of her characters keeps us hooked."
-Calgary Herald
"Part testimony, part remembrance, part discovery, Sandra Birdsell's
new novel, The Chrome Suite, goes inside out to tell a story of loss
and remembrance.... The writing is always a joy, the kind that slows
the reader down to savour every vivid moment."
-Quill and Quire
"Birdsell writes brilliantly about childhood, family relationships and
small town life."
-Toronto Star
"This novel has the power of all uncompromising fiction; Sandra Birdsell's
hard-edged accurate prose and her unfailingly intelligent observations of
the way people live are deeply satisfying to read."
-Winnipeg Free Press
"Birdsell fills (the) air with booksong worthy of undistracted attention."
-Ottawa Citizen
The
Missing Child
A novel
Lester & Orpen Dennys (an imprint of Key Porter Books), reprint 1998
Lester & Orpen Dennys 1989
Winner
of the W.H.Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award
"Birdsell clearly loves her characters. She has their intricate
movements mapped out in her head at all times.... The Missing Child
is a brilliant, sustained, and perfectly constructed novel and clearly a winner."
-citation
for First Novel Award
"Isolated deep in a glacial valley, the town of Agassiz churns with conflicting undercurrents. Yet only eccentric, lovable Minnie Pullman, possessed of an extraordinary gift of memory, is aware that an ancient underground glacier is melting and the valley is about to be wiped out. As the river rises, as children go missing and death strikes unexpectedly, the novel builds to its tumultuous climax, and the townspeople come vividly to life. Sandra Birdsell has people the world of Agassiz with characters both larger than life yet ultimately familiar. In the details, follies, struggles and joys of their lives we see a reflection of ourselves. The Missing Child is deeply humane in its vision."
Praise
for The Missing Child
Winner of the W.H.Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award
"Birdsell clearly loves her characters. She has their intricate
movements mapped out in her head at all times.... The Missing Child
is a brilliant, sustained, and perfectly constructed novel and clearly a winner."
-citation for First Novel Award
"... hauntingly
universal ..."
-Michael Ondaatje
"In The Missing Child Birdsell Brilliantly transforms (a town) into a
world where the miraculous is ordinary and the ordinary miraculous."
-Jane Urquhart
"The grotesque, the cruel, and the absurd are seen for what they are
... brilliantly imagined and beautifully written ..."
-Books in Canada
"... lush and lyrical, the characters deftly drawn, the setting alive
with the pulse of nature."
-Toronto Star
"Sandra Birdsell's first novel dazzles the reader with the palpable creation
of the fictional town of Agassiz and a shimmering kaleidoscope of truth and
lies, characters and events, times and places, stories and stories-within-stories,
day-and-night images and dreams, obsessions and passions, and desires and
fears. The Missing Child is enchanting, entrancing ... Birdsell
exudes a confident, authoritative sense of poetic style."
-Prairie Fire
"... a winning mixture of reality and vision."
-Now Magazine
"Sandra Birdsell has brought enormous energy to The Missing Child. The
characters she has chosen for this neighborhood ... make up a carefully organized
microcosm. The movement of the individual characters- chaotic, realistic and
fantastic all at once- is set against fully realized forces determined by
the unknown, by history, by fate and by human potential and limitation....
The intellectual energy in The Missing Child would not survive unless
accompanied by crafty writing, and this novel is full of it. There are some
fine, sweet descriptions of the smallest of things. Much is seen with a fresh
eye. Birdsell is apparently unaware that there is nothing new under the sun."
-Bonnie Burnard, Globe and Mail
"... a powerful first novel."
-Ottawa Citizen
"... provocative, political and funny ..."
-Hamilton Spectator
"None of Sandra Birdsell's past fiction quite prepares you for her first
novel. The Missing Child is a big book that pries the lid off ordinary reality,
moving freely between the language of the conscious mind and the images of
the unconscious.... (The novel's) extraordinary vitality comes from
the vividness of the author's language, the unerring accuracy of her characterizations
and images that seem to come from the outside reaches of the imagination....
What (Birdsell) has produced ... is a disturbing, intelligent, exuberant
novel, one that you will feel in your backbone as you read. The Missing Child
is a wonderful book."
-Winnipeg Free Press
"... Birdsell can be wise, witty, severely profound."
-Maclean's
"... a fast-paced and tightly structured ... Birdsell's characters are
extremely well-drawn and their lives are rich and full, although also extremely
normal and believable. Birdsell is an expert at making the seemingly ordinary
appear miraculous and poetic."
-The Journal
Agassiz
Stories
Short stories
Emblem Editions, McClelland & Stewart 2002
The superbly crafted stories in this internationally acclaimed collection
trace four generations of the Lafrenière family in the fictional small
town of Agassiz, Manitoba, from the time of the great flood in 1950 to the
present. There is Mika, the matriarch of the family, tired of being a mother
to her children, and her Métis husband, Maurice, who is by turns fascinated
by and ashamed of his Native heritage. Their marriage has long been an uneasy
truce. As their children grow up to pursue their own lives, the frustrations
of one generation will collide with the dreams of another, and the past will
leave an indelible mark on all that is to come. Agassiz Stories is at once
funny and heartbreaking, and written with rare, illuminating honesty.
Praise
for Agassiz Stories
"... a remarkable achievement ... confirms Birdsell's position as one
of the best short story writers in the language."
- Alberto Manguel, Books in Canada
"... beautifully crafted assemblage of stories.... Each piece is
a model of economy; cumulatively, they resonate with the unsparing power of
a memory mediated only by art."
-Publishers Weekly
"... skillful use of symbols, a remarkable ease in shifting back and
forth in time ... crisp, realistic dialogue that makes a character--young
or old--jump to life; nice touches of humour; and ability to give ordinary
people a certain grandeur, to make the commonplace both significant and interesting."
-Books in Review
"Sibling rivalry; the trials of puberty, teenage rebellion- Birdsell
deals deftly with them all.... (She) has us well and truly hooked ..."
-Globe and Mail
"Her stories spring from some deep underground stream that flows through
the heart."
-Rick Hillis, Philadelphia Inquirer
(Birdsell)
is a masterful storyteller, able to render quiet moment of beauty and grace
as ballast to bleakness."
-Kirkus Reviews
"Birdsell writes with the kind of emotional and psychological honesty
that distinguishes Munro s work.... She has good insight into family relationships
and the alternating loyalty, duplicity, jealousy, treachery and compassion
of its members... By the final story, we feel we know this family as well
as any other in Canadian fiction.... Birdsell has us well and truly hooked.
-Globe and Mail
"An infinite pleasure."
-Minnesota Daily
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