When researching the first occupant of her Saskatoon home, Candace Savage discovers a family more fascinating and heartbreaking than she ever expected.
Vancouver, BC – Greystone Books has acquired World All Language rights to Strangers in the House: A Story of Bigotry and Belonging by award-winning author Candace Savage. An evocative page-turner, Strangers in the House investigates an intriguing family history and, in doing so, reveals the shocking bigotry that underlay the settlement of English Canada.
A man named Napoléon Sureau dit Blondin built Savage's house in the 1920s, an era when French-speakers like him were deemed “undesirable” by the political and social elite, who sought to populate the Canadian prairies with WASPs only. In an atmosphere poisoned first by the Orange Order and then by the Ku Klux Klan, Napoléon and his young family adopted anglicized names and did their best to disguise their “foreigness."
In Strangers in the House, Savage scours public records and historical accounts, and interviews several of Napoléon’s descendants, including his youngest son, to reveal a family story marked by struggle and resilience. In the process, she examines a troubling episode in Canadian history, one with surprising relevance today.
Greystone Books is proud to release Strangers in the House in Fall of 2019.
Candace Savage is the award-winning author of more than two dozen books including A Geography of Blood. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and, in 1994, was inducted into the Honor Roll of the Rachel Carson Institute, Chatham College, in Pittsburgh. She shares her time between Eastend and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
Greystone Books is a trade book publisher that focuses on high-quality non-fiction. Greystone is based in Vancouver, Canada, with offices in the UK and United States.
Image by Kyla Duhamel on Flikr
Wanuskewin Heritage Park, near Saskatoon