Most Popular Books by Rudy Wiebe

Rudy Wiebe’s latest novel is at once an enthralling saga of the Mennonite people and one man’s emotional voyage into his heritage and his own self-discovery. Ambitious in its historical sweep, tender and humane, Sweeter Than All the World takes us on an extraordinary odyssey never before fully related in a contemporary novel. The novel tells the story of the Mennonite people from the early days of persecution in sixteenth-century Netherlands, and follows their emigration to Danzig, London, Russia, and the Americas, through the horrors of World War II, to settlement in Paraguay and Canada. It is told episodically in a double-stranded narrative. The first strand consists of different voices of historical figures. The other narrative voice is that of Adam Wiebe, born in Saskatchewan in 1935, whom we encounter at telling stages of his life: as a small boy playing in the bush, as a student hunting caribou a week before his wedding, and as a middle-aged man carefully negotiating a temporary separation from his wife. As Adam faces the collapse of his marriage and the disappearance of his daughter, he becomes obsessed with understanding his ancestral past. Wiebe meshes the history of a people with the story of a modern family, laying bare the complexities of desire and family love, religious faith and human frailty. The past comes brilliantly alive, beginning with the horrors of the Reformation, when Weynken Claes Wybe is burned at the stake for heretical views on Communion. We are caught up in the great events of each century, as we follow in the footsteps of Adam’s forebears: the genius engineer who invented the cable-car system; the artist Enoch Seeman, who found acclamation at the royal court in London after having been forbidden to paint by the Elders; Anna, who endures the great wagon trek across the Volga in 1860, leaving behind her hopes of marriage so that her brothers will escape conscription in the Prussian army; and Elizabeth Katerina, caught in the Red Army’s advance into Germany when rape and pillage are the rewards given to soldiers. The title of the novel, taken from a hymn, reflects the beauty and sorrow of these stories of courage. In a startling act of invention, Sweeter Than All the World sets one man’s quest for family and love against centuries of turmoil. Rudy Wiebe first wrote of Mennonite resettlement in his 1970 epic novel The Blue Mountains of China. Since then, much of his work has focused on re-imagining the history of the Canadian Northwest. In Sweeter Than All the World, as in many of his most acclaimed novels, Wiebe has sought out real historical characters to tell an extraordinary story. William Keith, a University of Toronto professor and author of a book about Wiebe, writes: “Wiebe has a knack for divining wells of human feeling in historical sources.” Here, all the main characters share his name, and the history is one to which he belongs. Moreover, alongside those flashbacks into history is revealed an utterly compelling contemporary story of a man whose background is not totally unlike the author’s own. Wiebe sets his narrative against his two favourite backdrops: the northern Alberta landscape, and the shared memories of the Mennonite people. Sweeter Than All the World is a compassionate, erudite and stimulating work of fiction that shares the deep-rooted concerns of all of Wiebe’s work: how to make history live in our imagination, and how we can best live our lives.

Early in his writing career, Rudy Wiebe’s imagination was caught by a heroic character of Cree and Ojibwa ancestry whose birthplace was within twenty-five miles of where Wiebe himself was born 110 years later. The man’s name translated into English was Big Bear, and he came to be the subject of one of Wiebe’s most highly praised works of fiction. A modern classic, Wiebe’s fourth novel is a moving epic of the tumultuous history of the Canadian West. The book won the 1973 Governor General's Award, and in the 1990s was made into a CBC television miniseries based on a script co-written by Wiebe and Métis director Gil Cardinal, shot in Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley. From the early days of North America, European settlers forced Natives aside, taking over their land on which they had lived for thousands of years. Big Bear envisioned a Northwest in which all peoples lived together peaceably, and in the 1880s made history by standing his ground to keep his Plains Cree nation from being forced onto reserves. The buffalo food supply was vanishing, but Big Bear led his people across the prairie, resisting pressure to cede rights to the land and give up freedom in exchange for temporary nourishment. The struggle brought starvation to his followers, tearing apart the community and eventually his own family. The story follows Big Bear’s life as he lives through the last buffalo hunt, the coming of the railway, the pacification of the Native tribes, and his own imprisonment. Wiebe’s magnificent interpretation of Western Canadian history encompasses not only his hero's struggle for integrity and justice but also the whole richness of the Plains culture.

A rare and marvellous collection by a master teller of tales, together in one volume for the first time.River of Stone brings to readers an appealing selection of Rudy Wiebe's best and most loved writing — and draws us into a world that he has made distinctively his own. In this haunting collection, his stories and memoirs play off each other to reveal the geographical and emotional range of the country. Here we have timeless meditations on country, particularly the West and the North; memories of a Mennonite childhood, and the pain of being cast out by the community; of writing and history; of pioneer days lived with love and struggle; and unexpected, entertaining stories that are by turn loving, macabre, ironic, sad and joyful, and very funny.

Rudy Wiebe has written award-winning fiction for decades. He is recognized as one of Canada's finest literary treasures. Twice he has received Canada's most prestigious prize for fiction writing: The Governor-General's Award (equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize for fiction). Now comes new recognition for Wiebe's nonfiction writing. His recently released childhood memoir, Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest, has won the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Nonfiction (considered to be the country's most prestigious literary nonfiction prize). The book holds Rudy's memoirs of growing up through age 12. His immigrant family cut a farm out of stony bushland in remote Saskatchewan. They hand-dug their well, climbed a ladder to their beds under the rafters, farmed with horses, and traveled by sleigh on the frontier. Stories and singing and food from their native Ukraine and Poland held them and filled their bodies and souls. Of This Earth is written with "spare and eloquent prose," say the jurors who chose the book for the Charles Taylor Prize. Wiebe "conveys the riches of a hardscrabble inheritance; a love of words, reading and music, a sustaining yet unsentimental faith, and a bond with the natural world, all of which have provided a compass for his writing life." One of the Taylor-Prize jurors reflected, "Rudy's book haunts you; it stays with you."

A Discovery of Strangers is a story—based on true events—of love and innocence, murder, greed and passion set within the terrifying, fragile Arctic landscape. In 1820, John Franklin’s small group of British officers and Canadian voyageurs, on their first Expedition to search for a route through the incomprehensible North, encountered the Yellowknife Indians—and Greenstockings, fifteen-year-old daughter of Keskarrah, elder of the Yellowknife, met young Robert Hood, son of a Lancashire clergyman. Wordless, they devise a language of their own as their two worlds clash.

“What can that mean, I and my family will have a ‘reserve of one square mile’?” So asks Big Bear of Governor Morris, come to impose a square treaty on the round, buffalo-covered world of the Plains Cree. As the buffalo vanish and the tension builds to the second Riel Rebellion, Big Bear alone of the prairie chiefs keeps up pressure for a better treaty by refusing to choose a reserve. He argues, “If any man has the right to put a rope around another man’s neck, some day someone will get choked.” It is Big Bear’s story – and the story of Wandering Spirit, of Kitty McLean and John McDougall–that is told in this novel with rare and penetrating power. Permeated with a sense of place and time, this eagerly awaited work by Rudy Wiebe reflects the author’s sensitivity to the Canadian prairies, their history, the minds and hearts of their diverse people. Exploring Big Bear’s isolated struggle, Wiebe has encompassed in one creative sweep not only his hero’s struggle for integrity, but the whole range and richness of the Plains culture. Here is the giant circle of the prairie horizon, and the joy, the sorrow, the pain and the triumph and the violence of unconquerable human beings faced with destruction.

Big Bear (1825–1888) was a Plains Cree chief in Saskatchewan at a time when aboriginals were confronted with the disappearance of the buffalo and waves of European settlers that seemed destined to destroy the Indian way of life. In 1876 he refused to sign Treaty No. 6, until 1882, when his people were starving. Big Bear advocated negotiation over violence, but when the federal government refused to negotiate with aboriginal leaders, some of his followers killed 9 people at Frog Lake in 1885. Big Bear himself was arrested and imprisoned. Rudy Wiebe, author of a Governor General’s Award–winning novel about Big Bear, revisits the life of the eloquent statesman, one of Canada’s most important aboriginal leaders.

A collection of essays about the Canadian Arctic, both land and people, by a Canadian writer enamoured of the North.

From a 2-time winner of the Governor General's Literary Award, an intense novel of loss, memory and the limitless nature of family love. Hal Wiens, a retired professor, is mourning the sudden death of his loving wife, Yo. To get through each day, he relies on the bare comfort of routine and regular phone calls to his children Dennis and Miriam, who live in distant cities with their families. One snowy April morning, while drinking coffee with his Dené friend Owl in south-side Edmonton, he sees a tall man in an orange downfill jacket walk past on the sidewalk. The jacket, the posture, the head and hair are unmistakable: it's his beloved oldest son, Gabriel. But it can't be—Gabriel killed himself 25 years ago. The sighting throws Hal's inert life into tumult. While trying to track down the man, he is irresistibly compelled to revisit the diaries, journals and pictures Gabe left behind, to unfold the mystery of his son's death. Through Gabe's own eyes we begin to understand the covert sensibilities that corroded the hope and light his family knew in him. As he becomes absorbed in his son's life, lost on a tide of "relentless memory," Hal's grief—and guilt—is portrayed with a stunning immediacy, drawing us into a powerful emotional and spiritual journey. Come Back is a rare and beautiful novel about the humanity of living and dying, a lyrical masterwork from one of our most treasured writers.

In 1944, as war rages across Europe and Asia, famine, violence and fear are commonplace. But life appears tranquil in the isolated farming settlement of Wapiti in northern Saskatchewan, where the Mennonite community continues the agricultural lifestyle their ancestors have practised for centuries. Their Christian values of peace and love lead them to oppose war and military service, so they are hardly affected by the war – except for the fact that they are reaping the rewards of selling their increasingly valuable crops and livestock. Thom Wiens, a young farmer and earnest Christian, begins to ask questions. How can they claim to oppose the war when their livestock become meat to sustain soldiers? How can they enjoy this free country but rely on others to fight to preserve that freedom? Within the community, conflicts and broken relationships threaten the peace, as the Mennonite tradition of close community life manifests itself as racism toward their “half-breed” neighbours, and aspirations of holiness turn into condemnation of others. Perhaps the greatest hope for the future lies with children such as Hal Wiens, whose friendship with the Métis children and appreciation of the natural environment offer a positive vision of people living at peace with themselves and others. Wiebe’s groundbreaking first novel aroused great controversy among Mennonite communities when it was first published in 1962. Wiebe explains, “I guess it was a kind of bombshell because it was the first realistic novel ever written about Mennonites in western Canada. A lot of people had no clue how to read it. They got angry. I was talking from the inside and exposing things that shouldn't be exposed.” At the same time, other reviewers were unsure how to react to Wiebe’s explicitly religious themes, a view which Wiebe found absurd. “There are many, many people who feel that religious experience is the most vital thing that happens to them in their lives, and how many of these people actually ever get explored in modern novels?” The concept of peace is an important theme in Wiebe’s first three books. The attempt to live non-violently, one of the basic tenets of the Mennonite faith as taught by the sixteenth-century spiritual leader Menno Simons, is what has “caused the Mennonites the most difficulty in their relationship with everybody,” forcing them to move again and again. The theme of peace versus passivity is further explored in The Blue Mountains of China, where inner peace, a state of being, is contrasted with the earthly desire for a place of public order and tranquility where the church is “there for a few hours a Sunday and maybe a committee meeting during the week to keep our fire escape polished,” as Thom, the protagonist puts it.. Wiebe has said, “To be an Anabaptist is to be a radical follower of the person of Jesus Christ . . . and Jesus Christ had no use for the social and political structures of his day; he came to supplant them.” While Peace Shall Destroy Many takes place in a Mennonite community, its elements are universal, delineating the way young idealism rebels against staid tradition, as a son clashes with his father. In the face of violent confrontations between beliefs all over the world, the novel remains as compelling now as it was nearly forty years ago.

Winner of the Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize A powerful autobiography from Yvonne Johnson—the great-great-granddaughter of Cree leader Chief Big Bear. This is the unforgettable true story of Yvonne Johnson’s early life and a revealing account of injustice toward Indigenous women. After being convicted of murder in 1991, Johnson collaborated with acclaimed writer Rudy Wiebe to journey into her spirit self, to share the conflict and abuse that characterized her life. In the bringing together of Wiebe’s deep insight and Johnson’s poetic eloquence, Stolen Life is a devastating depiction of enduring familial love and, from Wiebe’s perspective, a courtroom drama that unravels the events that led to her conviction. But above all, it is the testimony of a Cree woman who decided to speak out to dispel shame and break the silence that binds. 9780676971965

For readers of Wiebe's Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest and Sandra Birdsell's The Russländer comes an epic novel on the Mennonite experience, by a Governor General's Literary Award-winning author. The Blue Mountains of China tells the unforgettable story of a group of Russian Mennonites in search of a land that would give them religious freedom. Alive with the excitement of a journey that begins in the oppressive poverty of a Russian village and ends on the Canadian prairies and in the Chaco Boreal of Paraguay, this is the story of a remarkable group of men and women—all determined, above all else, to triumph in their quest. More than a saga of generations, The Blue Mountains of China is Rudy Wiebe's stirring testimony to the enduring human spirit.

Sixteen short stories, most of which are set in Alberta or the Yukon Territories.

""Sixteen years later Louis Riel would be dressing himself again ... to be hanged by his neck until he is at last, perfectly, dead. 0 my God have mercy."" So begins Rudy Wiebe's powerful portrayal of Louis Riel, the mystic revolutionary of the Northwest, and Gabriel Dumont - "the savage" as he calls himself - the great buffalo hunter who becomes Riel's commander-in-chief. With the same epic scope and inspired vision that he brought to "The Temptations of Big Bear" (winner of the Governor Generals Award for Fiction), Wiebe recreates an agonizing chapter in Canadian history which can never be forgotten -- the explosive world of the North West Rebellions and the characters of the two men who led them. Written with powerful clarity and compassion, "The Scorched-Wood People" is an immense achievement, a brilliant exploration of the faces of prophetic vision, the morality of politics and the nature of faith.

2004 Alberta Children's Book of the Year In this lyrical coming-of-age story, Governor General's Award-winner Rudy Wiebe captures the anxiety of a boy who feels powerless to help his people, but who must speak his dreams if they are to survive. Steeped in aboriginal myth and lore, Hidden Buffalo is also the tale of how a whole tribe can turn its gaze from the horizon to see to the wisdom of a child. Original paintings by noted Cree artist Michael Lonechild capture the colorful palette of the prairie landscape in autumn and the rich detail of Cree life in the late nineteenth century.

My Lovely Enemy is published by Fitzhenry and Whiteside.

Alberta/A Celebration, a unique combination of the talents of a distinguished award-winning author, a widely acclaimed painter-photographer, and a noted film maker, is published to commemorate the province's Diamond Jubilee -- Alberta's 75th anniversary.

A collaborative piece between writer, actors and director. The action is triggered by events surrounding the Dodds-Round Hill Power Development Project south-east of Edmonton in 1973-1976. Local farmers tried to stop the project.

Story of Mad Trapper, a silent man of superhuman strength and endurance, who defied capture for 50 days in the bitter cold of winter north of the Arctic Circle.

The result of a dialogue between poets and scholars on the meaning and making of the sacred, this book endeavours to determine how the sacred emerges in sacred script as well as in poetic discourse. It ranges through scholarship in areas as apparently disparate as postmodernism and Buddhism. The perspectives developed are various and without closure, locating the sacred in modes as diverse as patristic traditions, feminist retranslations of biblical texts, and oral and written versions of documents from the world’s religions. The essays cohere in their preoccupation with the crucial role language plays in the creation of the sacred, particularly in the relation that language bears to silence. In their interplay, language does not silence silence by, rather, calls the other as sacred into articulate existence.

Infused with the same storytelling style and energy that have made him one of Canada's most widely read and respected novelists, Rudy Wiebe's First and Vital Candle is the powerful story of one man's search for meaning, both in the mean streets of our urban landscape, and in the wilderness beyond. Rebellious, adrift and alone in his quest, the middle aged hero of this compelling novel settles finally with a band of Ojibway in Northern Ontario where, confronted with the mystical and spiritual qualities of the North and its people, he is finally able to open his heart to love and profound understanding.

A collection of forty years of essays and speeches by the author.

Conflicts between the disciplined, non-violent dedication of the thriving Mennonite community and the threats and challenges from the war-torn world they left behind reveal a lurking violence beneath the peaceful surface of settlement life.

Donation.

Scope and content: Fonds consists of correspondence; research material; notes; manuscripts of novels, short stories, television plays and screenplays; speeches; lectures; works on R. Wiebe; and material relating to R. Wiebe's editing of short story anthologies. Includes material relating to R. Wiebe's teaching creative writing courses at the University of Alberta and to his involvement with the Writers' Union of Canada and Canada Council.