Who By Fire
"On the page Stenson is like Frank Sinatra in a stetson--smooth and pitch perfect. And if details give literature its staying power, Stenson is writing for the ages." --Caroline Adderson, The Globe and Mail
The heart of this moving story belongs to Tom Ryder--a man whose expectations for the future and assumptions about his own strength and power are persistently and devastatingly undermined by the arrival of a sour gas plant on the border of his southern Alberta farm in the early 1960s. The emissions from the plant poison not only his livestock but the relationships he has with his family, most especially with his wife, Ella. The family is left without viable legal recource against the plant, and Tom must…
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.