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FRIDAY @ 7: The award-winning author of "The Great Karoo."
Maggie SigginsFRIDAY @ 9: Prolific author of "Marie-Anne: The Extraordinary Life of Louis Riel's Grandmother."
Joan ThomasSATURDAY @ 7: The Manitoban author of "Reading by Lightning."
Daria SalamonSATURDAY @ 9: Author of the popular new novel, "The Prairie Bridesmaid."
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Remember to sign up for our 24-hour short story writing contest. Test your mettle again Brandon's most exhausted writers, as you battle for the title of Caffeine King or Queen. One winner will be published in the Brandon Sun and in the official program of Words Alive. To be held overnight, Oct. 25-26.
Sign up here!Thanks to generous support from the Brandon Neighbourhood Renewal Corporation, we're proud to offer Words Alive completely free of charge this year!
FRED STENSON is the author of The Trade, which was nominated for the 2000 Giller Prize and won the inaugural Grant MacEwan Writer’s Award, the City of Edmonton Book Prize, and the Writers Guild of Alberta’s Georges Bugnet Novel Award. The Great Karoo is Stenson’s eighth book of fiction and fifteenth book overall. He has also written scripts for over 140 produced films and videos. He writes a regular humour column for Alberta Views Magazine. He was raised on a farm in the Alberta foothills north of Chief Mountain and lives in Cochrane, Alberta.
From this award-winning author comes a richly evocative new novel, at once brutal and tender, spare of language, and profoundly moving.
The Great Karoo begins in 1899, as the British are trying to wrest control of the riches of South Africa from the Boers, the Dutch farmers who claimed the land. The Boers have turned out to be more resilient than expected, so the British have sent a call to arms to their colonies — and an a great number of men from the Canadian prairies answer the call and join the Canadian Mounted Rifles: a unit in which they can use their own beloved horses. They assume their horses will be able to handle the desert terrain of the Great Karoo as readily as the plains of their homeland. Frank Adams, a cowboy from Pincher Creek, joins the Rifles, along with other young men from the ranches and towns nearby — a mix of cowboys and mounted policeman, who, for whatever reason, feel a desire to fight for the Empire in this far-off war.
Against a landscape of extremes, Frank forms intense bonds with Ovide Smith, a French cowboy who proves to be a reluctant soldier, and Jefferson Davis, the nephew of a prominent Blood Indian chief, who is determined to prove himself in a “white man’s war.” As the young Canadians engage in battle with an entrenched and wily enemy, they are forced to realize the bounds of their own loyalty and courage, and confront the arrogance and indifference of those who have led them into conflict. For Frank, disillusionment comes quickly, and his allegiance to those from the Distict of Alberta, soon displaces any sense of patriotism to Canada or Britain, or belief that he’s fighting for a just cause.
The events of the novel follow the trajectory of the war. The British strategy of burning Boer farms, destroying herds, and moving Boer families into camps weakens the Boer rebels, but they refuse to give up. The thousands of Boer women and children who die in the camp make the war ever more unpopular among liberals in Britain. (In fact, this conflict marked the first use of the term “concentration camp” in war.) Seeing the ramifications of such short-sighted military decisions, and how they affect what happens to Frank and the other Canadians, is crucial to depicting the reality of the Boer War. By focusing on the experiences of a small group of men from southern Alberta, Fred Stenson brings the reality of what it would have been like to be a soldier in this brutal war to vivid life.
The Great Karoo is a deeply satisfying novel, marked by the complexities of its plot, the subtleties of its relationships, and the scale of its terrain. Exhilarating and gruesome by turns, it explores with passion and insight the lasting warmth of friendship and the legacy of devastation occasioned by war.
“A truly magnificent novel by one of Canada’s greatest living writers.” — David Adams Richards, author of The Lost Highway