After Alice

Having escaped the place in her youth, retired professor Sidonie von Täler returns to her ancestral Okanagan valley orchards still very much in the shadow of her deceased older sister Alice. As she sifts through the detritus of her family history, Sidonie is haunted by memories of trauma and triumph in equal measure, and must reconcile past and present while reconnecting with the people she left behind. Karen Hofmann's debut novel blends a poetic sensibility with issues of land stewardship, social stratification and colonialism. Her eye for period detail and characterisation is reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin or Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel, while her lyrical realisation of bygone B.C. pastoralia recalls the work of George Bowering.