We've got another novel for you this month! We read Probably Ruby by Lisa Bird-Wilson and asked acclaimed author and storyteller Michelle Good to join us to talk about it. Published in 2021, Probably Ruby tells the story of an Indigenous woman who was adopted out as an infant on her journey to find family and identity. The novel won the 2022 Saskatchewan Book Awards Book of the Year, and was shortlist for the Governor General's Literary Award and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award.
More about Probably Ruby:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/669226/probably-ruby-by-lisa-bird-wilson/9780385696708
More about Michelle Good:
Michelle Good is a Cree writer and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. After working for Indigenous organizations for twenty-five years, she obtained a law degree and advocated for residential school survivors for over fourteen years. Good earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia while still practising law and managing her own law firm. Her poems, short stories, and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies across Canada, and her poetry was included on two lists of the best Canadian poetry in 2016 and 2017. Five Little Indians, her first novel, won the HarperCollins/UBC Best New Fiction Prize, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Award, the Evergreen Award, the City of Vancouver Book of the Year Award, and Canada Reads 2022. It was also longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a finalist for the Writer’s Trust Award, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes. On October 7, 2022 Simon Fraser University granted her an Honorary Doctor of Letters. Her new work, Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous life in Canada is set for release on May 30, 2023.