Housekeeper-or whore?

Twenty-year-old Moira, the daughter of a Newfoundland doctor, dreams of becoming a doctor herself; but when she becomes pregnant out of wedlock, she is banished to the bleak landscape of southern Saskatchewan in 1906, where she must come to terms with her predicament, her pioneer environment, and her employment as a "dollybird," a term applied to women who might be housekeepers, might be whores-or could be both.

A saga of birth, death, and the violent potential of both men and the elements, Dollybird explores the small mercies that mean more than they should under a prairie sky that waits, not so quietly, for people to fail.

Winner of the Willa Award for Historical Fiction

Saskatchewan Book Award Finalist

ANN LAZURKO, a graduate of the Humber Creative Writing Program, has had short fiction and poetry published in literary magazines and anthologies and is active in the prairie writing community as mentor, editor, and teacher. Dollybird, her first novel, originally published by Coteau Books, received the Willa Award for Historical Fiction and was shortlisted for the Saskatchewan Book Awards Fiction Award. Her second novel, What is Written on the Tongue, was released in the spring of 2022 by ECW Press and was shortlisted for the 2022 Glengarry Book Award. She writes from her farm near Weyburn, Saskatchewan.

Anne Lazurko's profile page

• Winner, Willa Award for Historical Fiction
• Short-listed, Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction

Winner of the Willa Award for Historical Fiction

Saskatchewan Book Award finalist

"Anne Lazurko has created a vivid pioneer landscape, effortlessly incorporating historical details to bring the era to life. The characters are determined and passionate, their trials memorable. This is a thoughtful, engaging novel about making choices and then making the best of them." - Connie Gault, Commonwealth Prize-nominated author of Euphoria

"Anne Lazurko pieces together losses and landscapes, myths and misfortunes, in a page-turning story where small acts of kindness have profound, even life-saving, consequences. Dollybird is unsentimental, while captioned with grace." - Darcie Friesen Hossack, Commonwealth Prize-nominated author of Mennonites Don't Dance

"Dollybird is a page-turner. Every character is fully realized, crippled by pains specific and universal. The writing is shot through with poetry, even the landscape is rendered harsh and graceful in the same moment . . . Such a cast of characters-everyone steps off the page, even those we only catch a glimpse of . . . Dollybird covered me in dust and mud; the pages are intoned with every kind of love: the absent, the lost, the yearning, the found. Read Dollybird." - Katherine Lawrence, award-winning writer and poet

"Dollybird explores human relationships: parents and children, men and women, siblings and female friends, and how these connections are further complicated in the face of an indifferent, unpredictable natural environment . . . Lazurko's straightforward prose transports the reader to early 20th-century Canada . . . Hers is an unidealized portrayal of life at that time, as known to the working poor, the disenfranchised, and the sickly. Her characters are well-developed, flawed, and frightened. Dollybird, like all good novels, and life itself, leaves much to ponder and question. It does reassure us, however, that placing ourselves in a new location does not necessarily mean that we have left old attitudes and beliefs behind." - Laurie Glenn Norris, Telegraph-Journal

"The novel's strength lies in its glimpses into not only the hardship but also the tight sense of community that marked pioneering men and women . . . Lazurko's title speaks to the confining roles women were permitted to have as the West was 'settled' and to the difficulties women faced when they, like Moira, tried to resist them." - The Coastal Spectator