Sandy Marie Bonny

Historian Tanis and high school teacher Neil have just purchased their dream home on Saskatoon’s west side: a fixer-upper with plenty of character and an abundance of history to uncover. But as Tanis moves deeper towards uncovering the secrets of the Tanner family who originally inhabited their home — and the cause of the mysterious stains on the attic floor — Neil is pulled into a drama of his own, as two aboriginal teenagers from his school have gone missing and he is being looked to as a suspect. Taking its title from the Old English nursery rhyme “How Many Miles to Babylon?”, Yes, and Back Again examines the personal journeys required to bridge the distances between individuals, cultures, and generations in an atmosphere marked by class and racial divisions.

The stories in Sandy Bonny’s collection The Sometimes Lake will transport readers from the Arctic Circle to Alberta’s badlands, and from the waters of the Georgia Straight to the deep lasting space of the prairies. The characters that readers meet in these places will be oddly familiar or perhaps familiarly odd. There are children who live in the magical territory between their imagination and their parents’ realities; road builders from China and Australia who know the ghostly secrets at road’s end; men who shape their lives with the predictability of beehives; others who are confused by cultural shift or troubled by the security of cults; women who try to grieve for their unborn children, and others who play at suicide.

At the vortex of the surprising plots churns Bonny’s keen interest in science and its unexpected effect on human action and emotion. Her curiosity and scrutinizing intelligence as well as her ever playful wit guide the reader through close encounters with physical and psychological landscapes and then reveal the uncommon denominators in them that make people unique.

• Shortlisted for the 2012 Saskatchewan Book Award for Best First Book