Over one summer at her grandparents’ house in the South Saskatchewan River valley, a young girl struggles to decipher the mysterious language of adults—and attempts to figure out the relationship between her great-uncle Aloetius and Cherry, a woman whose absence defined Aloetius’s life.

Jacqueline Baker writes with confidence and unvarnished honesty, and she has the rare ability to make the familiar brilliant and finely understood. Hers are universal themes: the tensions of family life; relationships defined by what isn’t said, rather than what is; and our connection to a past that may be real or imagined.

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Praise for A Hard Witching

"What Alistair MacLeod has done for the Maritimes, Jacqueline Baker has done for the Sand Hills region of southwestern Saskatchewan. It is insightful and accurate in its depiction of the beauty and menace of the landscape and of the brutality and tenderness of its inhabitants.” —Diane Schoemperlen

Jacqueline Baker is the author of A Hard Witching And Other Stories, which won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the City of Edmonton Book Prize and the Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Fiction. It was also a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Raised in southwestern Saskatchewan, Jacqueline Baker has been the writer-in-residence at Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton and teaches at the Banff Centre for the Arts. She lives with her husband and two daughters in British Columbia.

Jacqueline Baker's profile page