RECENT WORK
Season of Fury and Wonder - out on May 1st, 2019 - is a collection of short stories in which each protagonist is an old woman, each aged between seventy to one hundred. A theme is how the past infiltrates and informs the present whether wanted or not; another is how unconscious ageism blights the lives the old, and a third is what becomes of the dreams and desires of youth and how such longings transform and provide insight, even wisdom, in old age. ALSO, each story is a response to a 'great' short story or literary work of the 19th-20th century, from that of Hemingway, Munro, Carver, Joyce, Flannery O'Connor, Edna O'Brien, Chekhov, Poe and others.
Zara's Dead, Sharon's new novel, published in May, 2018. This is a mystery with Fiona, the protagonist, now seventy, still angry at the unsolved murder of a young woman with whom she once went to school many years earlier. Zara had been a beauty queen, a promising young woman who dreamt of great things for herself, all snatched away in a few savagery-filled moments, followed by an investigation that almost immediately stalled, then failed. Fiona wants to know why, and she still wants to know who did it. This latter information, when she finally finds it, will alter not only the lives of others, but her own life forever.
Where I Live Now, Sharon's latest memoir, published in April 2017. This memoir is about a life lived on the land in southwest Saskatchewan, both idyllic and difficult and which, after 33 years, ended with the death of Butala's husband. The book goes on from there to follow her through her grief, sorrow and many losses as a new widow, to her struggles to make a new life in the city. As well as offering solace and hope, this book inspires others making the same difficult but ultimately joyful journey.
Wild Rose, a novel, published in September 2015, is of the earliest part of the settlement era on the prairies, about Sophie, a young Quebecoise mother who finds she has to make her own way in what was then decisively a man’s world.
Wild Rose, an epic story of The West, now long gone, charts Sophie’s journey from underloved child in religion- bound rural Quebec, to headstrong young woman to exhausted homesteader to deserted bride and mother to independent businesswoman finding her way in a hostile, if beautiful, landscape. (Coteau Books)
To purchase
Wild Rose online, go to
Coteau Books
Wild Rose is available in bookstores.
Saskatchewan, a selection of Sharon’s stories, translated into Hebrew and launched in 2015, Tel Aviv, Israel, (Margena Publishing, 2015)
The Girl in Saskatoon: A Meditation on Friendship, Memory and Murder (HarperCollins, 2008), a nonfiction work about, among other things, the unsolved murder in Saskatoon, back in 1962, of a young woman with whom Butala attended high school. It was an event that shook the city to its core and which no one has been able to forget. Butala probes the background to this fact, and in this book, also examines a forward-looking pioneer society.
REVIEWS
August 17, 2015 ~ Elaine Dewar, author of Smarts: The Boundary-Busting Story of Intelligence (Debonair[e]Books, Trade paperbacks, 2015)
“I read Wild Rose in the hospital while S. was being treated. This turned out to be wonderful: It took me immediately away from my own concerns to the prairies and into the life of Sophie, her grandparents, her brothers, her Pierre. It is in every way a page turner. There is something downright magical about the way the story unfolds from the present to the past and back again. I will read it again to see if I can see the change-ups coming, but it is so beautifully wrought that there are no seams, you’re just here with Sophie and there with her and right inside her skin. Loved the sense of place, the drive for freedom, the terrors of freedom. The thing that really got to me is Sophie’s sense of a spiritual reality, something quite separate from the rituals of the church. It’s a terrific read.”
But there’s another layer to this standard-setting example of “crone lit.” Not content to rest on her considerable literary laurels, Sharon Butala continues to push the boundaries of her art. The stories in Season of Fury and Wonder are all reactions to other, classic, works of literature that she has encountered and admired. These stories are, in their various ways, inspired by and tributes to works by the likes of Raymond Carver, Willa Cather, James Joyce, Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Conner, John Cheever, Alan Sillitoe, Ernest Hemingway, Tim O’Brien, Edgar Allan Poe and Anton Checkov.
