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A spellbinding and wise coming-of-age story, Shelter draws readers into the precarious world of two young sisters in search of their mother, and brings to life the breathtaking B.C. landscape through which they travel.
Maggie Dillon lives with her family in a small, roughly furnished cabin in B.C.’s Chilcotin region, where the land and the native peoples who’ve always called it home have taken in both pioneer settlers and latecomers like the Dillons. Her sister, Jenny, is the elder of the two, but Maggie seems beyond her years with how much she worries about what might happen to her family, so certain she is that threats to her family’s cozy but fragile life in Duchess Creek are never far away. Her beautiful mother, Irene, takes the girls on magical camping adventures and has a carefree love of life. Maggie’s careful father, on the other hand, takes her on outings to the bush where he shows her how to build lean-tos using leaves, sticks and fir boughs. Just in case. You never know when you might need to find some shelter for the night.
When her father is killed in a logging accident, Maggie thinks her worst fear has come true, but his death is only the first blow in the destruction of her family. Soon her mother, the one person Maggie has never worried about, abruptly drops off her girls in Williams Lake to billet with the gloomy Bea Edwards and her wheelchair-bound husband, Ted. Irene promises she’ll be back for them, but weeks turn to months and then to years.
When trouble finds the girls for the third time, it comes for Jenny, and fourteen-year-old Maggie decides that the time has come to search out their mother and repair their fractured family. Her quest not only to find but to understand her mother brings the novel to a powerful, wrenching conclusion.
Shelter’s emotional richness, and Maggie’s distinctive voice, evoke the bestselling novels of Miriam Toews and Mary Lawson. Greenslade’s prose captures the exquisite beauty of the Chilcotin, the precious comfort of family and the poignant realization that we may never fully understand the people we love.
Shelter was first published as part of Knopf and Random House Canada’s renowned New Face of Fiction program, which each year brings the cream of the crop of Canada’s first-time novelists to readers, and has launched the careers of numerous authors who have taken their place amongst Canada’s best. From the start, Shelter received outstanding reviews, and the book has since been named as a finalist for the B.C. Book Prizes’ Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and for the Evergreen Awards in Ontario. Shelter has also been published in the United States and in Britain – where the country’s largest book chain, Waterstones, named it one of the eleven best debut novels of the year – and rights have been sold to publishers in Germany and the Netherlands.
