Anne McDonald: To The Edge of the Sea

Huge congrats to Anne McDonald for winning the Best First Book Award at the 2012 Saskatchewan Book Awards with To the Edge of the Sea (Thistledown Press).

The book is a delight — and I have  been honoured to watch its progress from manuscript to print to winner! Congrats, Anne!

John A. Macdonald, Canada's First Prime Minister 
and a character in To the Edge of the Sea,
drinks a toast to the award. © SB 

Anne prepares for the podium  © SB  

And steps up, to claim her prize  © SB  

Here's what last night's Saskatchewan Book Awards program guide had to say about To the Edge of the Sea, selected by jurors Joan Barfoot, Christine Cowley and Katherine Gordon:

In the mid-19th century, three young Prince Edward Islanders explore their disparate futures at home and away, in a debut novel that is lyrical and precise in its descriptions of land, sea and people, and powerful in its accounts of both personal and political histories of the province and country. 

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