Finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction

Winner: McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award

Shortlisted for the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction

Shortlisted for the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award

“A Best Book of 2014” —CBC Books, Vancouver Sun, Winnipeg Free Press, Metronews

The Opening Sky is the story of a family with one foot in the counterculture and the other in the good life. Liz is a restless, energetic woman who manages a beautiful house and a non-profit agency with panache. Aiden is a therapist trying to manage his own anxieties. Sylvie is a university student and an activist, more than happy to stick her fingers into the fault lines in her parents’ thinking.

A situation with Sylvie’s new boyfriend upsets the family’s uneasy equilibrium. Noah has complicated ties to the family’s past, and as the novel opens, Liz, Aiden and Sylvie are confronted with a crisis that asks all three of them to revise their fundamental notions of who they are in the world.

The Opening Sky is published by McClelland & Stewart.

“The Opening Sky is a marvel. This is a contemporary narrative, fully-wired with eco-anxiety and intergenerational strife, yet somehow a sense of the mythic pervades the tale.  I loved this book. It thrilled me with its fierce portrayal of how we strive and fail and sometimes even manage to love.”
—Alissa York, author of Fauna

“The Opening Sky is a sharply observed, unflinching portrait of the middle class in the 21st century. A beautiful, harrowing book.”
—Don Gillmor, author of Mount Pleasant.