Fred Stenson – författare

From award-winning author Fred Stenson comes a richly evocative new novel, at once brutal and tender, spare of language, and profoundly moving.The Great Karoo begins in 1899, as the British are trying to wrest control of the riches of South Africa from the Boers, the Dutch farmers who claimed the land. The Boers have turned out to be more resilient than expected, so the British have sent a call to arms to their colonies — and an a great number of men from the Canadian prairies answer the call and join the Canadian Mounted Rifles: a unit in which they can use their own beloved horses. They assume their horses will be able to handle the desert terrain of the Great Karoo as readily as the plains of their homeland. Frank Adams, a cowboy from Pincher Creek, joins the Rifles, along with other young men from the ranches and towns nearby — a mix of cowboys and mounted policeman, who, for whatever reason, feel a desire to fight for the Empire in this far-off war.Against a landscape of extremes, Frank forms intense bonds with Ovide Smith, a French cowboy who proves to be a reluctant soldier, and Jefferson Davis, the nephew of a prominent Blood Indian chief, who is determined to prove himself in a “white man’s war.” As the young Canadians engage in battle with an entrenched and wily enemy, they are forced to realize the bounds of their own loyalty and courage, and confront the arrogance and indifference of those who have led them into conflict. For Frank, disillusionment comes quickly, and his allegiance to those from the Distict of Alberta, soon displaces any sense of patriotism to Canada or Britain, or belief that he’s fighting for a just cause.The events of the novel follow the trajectory of the war. The British strategy of burning Boer farms, destroying herds, and moving Boer families into camps weakens the Boer rebels, but they refuse to give up. The thousands of Boer women and children who die in the camp make the war ever more unpopular among liberals in Britain. (In fact, this conflict marked the first use of the term “concentration camp” in war.) Seeing the ramifications of such short-sighted military decisions, and how they affect what happens to Frank and the other Canadians, is crucial to depicting the reality of the Boer War. By focusing on the experiences of a small group of men from southern Alberta, Fred Stenson brings the reality of what it would have been like to be a soldier in this brutal war to vivid life. The Great Karoo is a deeply satisfying novel, marked by the complexities of its plot, the subtleties of its relationships, and the scale of its terrain. Exhilarating and gruesome by turns, it explores with passion and insight the lasting warmth of friendship and the legacy of devastation occasioned by war.From the Hardcover edition.

Who by Fire is a powerful, passionate novel about the march of "progress" and the environments, families, and ways of life destroyed in its wake.      The heart of this moving story belongs to Tom Ryder--a man whose expectations for the future and assumptions about his own strength and power are persistently and devastatingly undermined by the arrival of a sour gas plant on the border of his southern Alberta farm in the early 1960s. The emissions from the plant poison not only his livestock but the relationships he has with his family, most especially with his wife, Ella. The family is left without viable legal recource against the plant, and Tom must watch his farm dwindle away, his sense of himself dwindling away with it.    The novel moves into the present with the story of Tom''s son, Bill, who reacts to his father''s disappointments by rising through the managerial ranks of an oil company in Fort McMurray, hiding from his guilt in the local casino. Bill pushes himself towards a crisis in conscience through a relationship he has with a Native woman whose community is threatened by the actions of his company.

Meet Tyrone Lock: born of farmers' stock; overeducated, underemployed. An inveterate pick-nose and clandestine squeezer of Revels in the supermarket. Disaffected in a way that Adrian Mole would recognize (though as Tyrone takes pains to point out, he's hardly a tortured artist; his BA was in Economics). Inexplicably involved with the lovely, pampered Miss Athena Till.The young couple are preparing for their first trip abroad: the obligatory horizon-widening sojourn in Europe, the Land of the Forefathers and the Wellspring of Culture.Except that this is an excursion that Tyrone would do anything to get out of. His horizons are plenty broad, thank you very much, and he'd rather spend his days taking walks with his dog, fly-fishing without a hook, and composing such melodious odes to his native land as: O Beaver Creek, In the Foothills of Alberta's Rocky Mountains, I would sooner have you, Than a bunch of crappy marble fountains.First published in 1974 and now released for the first time in paperback, Lonesome Hero is a comic classic, the award-winning smartass novel that launched a spectacular writing career.This new revised edition restores scenes deleted from the original and also features an introduction by the inimitable Mark Anthony Jarman and an afterword by the author, who reflects how glad he is, looking back at his first novel, that Lonesome Hero still manages to embody the ironies of the era, the fact that we often understood perfectly how cartoonish we were. The early '70s was about avoiding work at all costs and trying to live amusingly during all one's waking hours: about how weirdly far we would go to accomplish that.