This Bright Dust
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Winner, Ottawa Book Awards
“A stirring tale of the Great Depression on Canada’s Alberta prairie. Readers will be moved.” — Publishers Weekly
One of the CBC’s Canadian Fiction Books to Read in Fall 2024
As the Great Depression winds down and war in Europe looms, the small Prairie community of Grayley is all but abandoned. After a decade of dust and drought, few families remain. With growing season approaching, Abel Dodds and the Wisharts decide to plant their crops once again — their last chance to make a living on their debt-burdened farms. But when they learn of an impending royal visit, tensions ignite between the neighbours.
Deeply rooted in the landscape of the Prairies and laced with contemporary concerns, This Bright Dust deftly explores the relationship between people and the land they inhabit. In a richly layered novel, Berkhout tells a moving tale of promise and disillusionment, of near disaster and the cultivation of joy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Berkhout (Why Birds Sing) offers a stirring tale of the Great Depression on Canada's Alberta prairie. In 1939, 26-year-old farmer Abel Dodds is barely surviving in the forgotten town of Grayley, where a drought has displaced many of his neighbors. Abel has stayed behind to look out for Una Wishart, his former classmate and secret crush, who lives on a nearby farm with her eight-year-old son, Toby. When news comes that the king and queen of England will tour Canada by train in the spring, Una fills Toby's head with ideas that the royals will stop in Grayley. Abel, irate that the pomp and circumstance will do nothing to help the dispossessed, vows to protest the tour. As the royals' arrival looms, Berkhout builds tension out of Abel's outrage and Una's need for hope. Along the way, she portrays the beauty of flowering wheat fields and the danger of dust storms in stark prose, and she grounds the narrative in themes of neighborliness and self-sacrifice. Readers will be moved.
