Dollybird

By (author): Anne Lazurko

Housekeeperor whore?

Twenty-year-old Moira, the daughter of a Newfoundland doctor, dreams of becoming a doctor herself; but when she becomes pregnant out of wedlock, she is banished to the bleak landscape of southern Saskatchewan in 1906, where she must come to terms with her predicament, her pioneer environment, and her employment as a “dollybird,” a term applied to women who might be housekeepers, might be whores-or could be both.

A saga of birth, death, and the violent potential of both men and the elements, Dollybird explores the small mercies that mean more than they should under a prairie sky that waits, not so quietly, for people to fail.

Winner of the Willa Award for Historical Fiction

Saskatchewan Book Award Finalist

AUTHOR

Anne Lazurko

ANN LAZURKO, a graduate of the Humber Creative Writing Program, has had short fiction and poetry published in literary magazines and anthologies and is active in the prairie writing community as mentor, editor, and teacher. Dollybird, her first novel, originally published by Coteau Books, received the Willa Award for Historical Fiction and was shortlisted for the Saskatchewan Book Awards Fiction Award. Her second novel, What is Written on the Tongue, was released in the spring of 2022 by ECW Press and was shortlisted for the 2022 Glengarry Book Award. She writes from her farm near Weyburn, Saskatchewan.


Reviews

“An absolutely stunning novel that I hope gets some notice. I’ve reviewed some 4,000 books for the Sun-Timesin the past 20 years; only a few times did something new glue me like this one. Dollybird. Very nice.” – Andrew Armitage, Book Editor for the Sun-Times

“A page-turner. Every character is fully realized, crippled by pains specific and universal. The writing is shot through with poetry, even the landscape is rendered harsh and graceful in the same moment . . . Dollybird covered me in dust and mud; the pages are intoned with every kind of love: the absent, the lost, the yearning, the found.” – Katherine Lawrence, award winning writer and poet


Awards

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Excerpts & Samples ×

Housekeeperor whore?

Twenty-year-old Moira, the daughter of a Newfoundland doctor, dreams of becoming a doctor herself; but when she becomes pregnant out of wedlock, she is banished to the bleak landscape of southern Saskatchewan in 1906, where she must come to terms with her predicament, her pioneer environment, and her employment as a “dollybird,” a term applied to women who might be housekeepers, might be whores-or could be both.

A saga of birth, death, and the violent potential of both men and the elements, Dollybird explores the small mercies that mean more than they should under a prairie sky that waits, not so quietly, for people to fail.

Winner of the Willa Award for Historical Fiction

Saskatchewan Book Award Finalist

Reader Reviews

Details

Dimensions:

294 Pages
8.5in * 5.5in * 1in
1lb

Published:

January 15, 2023

Country of Publication:

CA

ISBN:

9781989398586

Book Subjects:

FICTION / Historical / General

Featured In:

All Books

Language:

eng

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