Three years into the second millennium, Majestic, Alberta is a farm town dealing with depressed crop prices, international borders closing to Canadian beef, and a severe drought. Older farmers worry about their way of life changing while young people concoct ways to escape: drugs, partying, moving away. Even the church is on the brink of closing.

When local woman Annie Gallagher is struck by lightning while divining water for a well, stories of the town's past, including that of Annie and the grandmother who taught her water witching, slowly pour forth as everyone gathers for her funeral.

Told through the varied voices of the townspeople and Annie herself, The Death of Annie the Water Witcher by Lightning reveals Majestic to be a complex character in its own right, both haunted and haunting. Here, Audrey J. Whitson has written a novel of hard choices and magical necessity.

Audrey Whitson's short fiction has appeared in Alberta Views, the Canadian Journal of Prairie Literature, Confluence, FreeFall, andRoom Magazine. Her first book, Teaching Places (Wilfred Laurier University Press 2003), a memoir about how the land teaches, was shortlisted for three awards. Her poetry and essays have been published in many magazines and anthologies and have won awards. Audrey grew up on a farm in northern Alberta and has worked as a social worker, consulting and teaching theologian, editor and project manager. In the 1980s she spent almost five years in the San Francisco Bay Area, working with Mexican migrant workers and Central American refugees as well as studying feminist and liberation theology at the Graduate Theological Union (and Franciscan School of Theology) at Berkeley.

Audrey Whitson's profile page

Praise for The Death of Annie the Water Witcher by Lightning:
"Majestic is depicted with poetic complexity. Annie's friends have a salt-of-the-earth goodness, and Annie herself is a faceted, compelling woman who emerges from personal darkness to find her own peace."
~ Meg Nola, Foreword Reviews
"Whitson's novel is, by the end, a reckoning with the past, both personal and communal, but also a tale of joy-the earthy preparations for the dead and a diving born of the body."
Bryn Evans, Alberta Views
"It's tricky business, allowing so many voices to create the narrative in a story, but Audrey Whitson has linked these people together not only as people who loved Annie, but as community. Relationships with Annie emerge, and so too do the intimate details of the lives of her neighbours."
~ Betty Jane Hegerat, author of The Boy and Delivery
"[a] stunningly written novel...."
~ All Lit Up