Happy to see Winter’s Rage on today’s Calgary Herald Fiction Bestsellers List, in some very good company. Thanks to those who purchased my new novel from our local independent bookstores, Owl’s Nest and Shelf Life Books.

CALGARY BESTSELLERS * Calgary Herald * 2 Oct 2021

FICTION 1. Beautiful World, Where Are You

Sally Rooney. Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon are still young — but life is catching up with them.

2. Five Little Indians

Michelle Good. Told from the alternating points of view of five former residential school survivors.

3. Winter’s Rage

Susan Calder. Insurance investigator Paula Savard is pulled into another mystery.

4. Harlem Shuffle. Colson Whitehead. A family saga masquerading as a crime novel and ultimately a love letter to Harlem.

5. Fight Night. Miriam Toews. Fight Night unspools the pain, love, laughter, and above all, will to live a good life across three generations of women.

6. The Winter Wives. Linden Mac in ty re. psychological drama weaves threads of crime, disability and dementia together into a tale of unrequited love and delusion.

7. Bewilderment. Richard Powers. With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, tantalizing visions of life beyond and its account of a father and son’s ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Powers’ most moving novel.

8. The Midnight Library. Matt Haig. The books in the Midnight Library enable Nora to live as if she had done things differently.

9. Where the Crawdads Sing. Delia Owens. An exquisite ode to the natural world, a heartbreaking coming-of-age story, and a surprising tale of possible murder.

10. Hamnet. Maggie O’farrell. A portrait of a marriage and a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss.

Canada Day 2021 will be subdued or cancelled in most Canadian cities due to COVID-19 and the investigations of graveyards at former indigenous residential schools. My small effort at reconciliation has been to re-read my friend Joan Crate’s novel, Black Apple (Simon and Schuster Canada, 2016) about a Blackfoot girl taken from her family on the reserve to a residential school in southern Alberta in the late 1940s. Black Apple deals with all the horrors we’ve heard about the residential schools — children separated from their families and culture and given Christian names; subjected to brutal beatings, sexual abuse, and infectious illnesses that ripped through the institutions. Black Apple is fiction, but I found the story characters and situations gave me a depth I miss from current media reports.