Sharon Butala: 23 books

An intimate and uplifting book about finding renewal and hope through grief and loss. *“It was a terrible life; it was an enchanted life; it was a blessed life. And, of course, one day it ended.” —*Sharon Butala In the tradition of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking,...

When it was first published, The Perfection of the Morning catapulted Sharon Butala into literary stardom, causing the Toronto Star to crown her as "one of this country's true visionaries." At once a meditation on the world of nature and a personal and spiritual exploration of the roots...

From the author of the Number 1 best-selling The Perfection of the Morning. “The first night she hardly noticed he was gone, and even though she had expected him back before the moon rose, she slept soundly.” So begins acclaimed novelist and literary nonfiction writer Sharon Butala’s new novel....

Winner of the 1992 Authors Award for Paperback Fiction, Fever was also nominated for a Commonwealth Award. Like Real Life, Sharon Butala’s newest collection of short fiction, it is a collection of short stories that reveals the secret inner lives of women and men, skillfully peeling back their defenses...

“There are things that it is impossible to learn when you are young, no matter how much you read and study.” The season of fury and wonder, in Sharon Butala’s world, is the old age of women. These stories present the lives of old women – women of experience, who’ve seen much of life, who’ve...

On a very dark night, Janet attends a party with her friends Livie and Nathan, where she meets Baker and begins a relationship with him. It is not until much later that Janet begins to unravel his nice-guy exterior and learns that Baker is perhaps not who he seems. Fever is a collection of...

With his farm suffering due to drought, his wife incapacitated by depression after a miscarriage, and the house—which seems to be haunted—likely to be foreclosed, Gabriel cannot keep up with all the things going wrong in his life. It soon seems that both nature and the supernatural are teaming...

Charlotte’s life is in disarray after her fifteen-year-old daughter moves in with her deadbeat, squatter boyfriend. Charlotte’s husband stops going to work, and instead spends his days watching the Iran-Contra hearings; the police can do little to bring their daughter home; and Charlotte always...

Dr. Mowbray no longer feels that he is a healer, but instead believes that he carries death with him. Mr. Baker, dying in the hospital, dreams of being surrounded by the beauty of nature—a bamboo forest, the Sahara Desert, a sunny glade. Watching over the old man, Dr. Mowbray begins to see the lush...

The verb esperar means to wait. It also means to hope.—“The Past Was a Small Notebook, Much Scribbled-Upon”, Cora Siré Waiting, that most human of experiences, saturates all of our lives. We spend part of each day waiting—for birth, death, appointments, acceptance, forgiveness, redemption....

Driving across the city to have dinner with old friends, Marion finds herself suddenly reminded of an experience she had long forgotten. As the night progresses, the memories surface one after another, some more easily recalled and others feeling as though they occurred in dreams rather than reality—all...

When her father-in-law dies, Carol prepares to go through the process of grieving with her husband. What she does not expect is to become entrenched in memories of her own father and their distant relationship, an experience that leads her to consider the many ways in which people mourn and begin...

When Alexis and her son, Jamie, are interviewed about a play based on their lives, Alexis recalls meaningful moments throughout their relationship and learns that she and Jamie do not share the same opinions about the events defining their lives. Throughout the interview, Alexis struggles to discover...

After her marriage deteriorates, Joan’s life also seems to be falling apart. Irked by living in the suburbs—far from downtown and alone in a neighbourhood of families—Joan moves into a room in a shared house where the other occupants are all young and single. There, her health—already affected...