A debut novel by an exciting new voice in Canadian literature, I Want to Die in My Boots weaves fact and fiction to tell the true-ish story of horse thief Belle Jane.

I Want to Die in My Boots is the untold story of Belle Jane, the woman who ran one of Canada’s largest cattle thieving rings in the 1920s, who brilliantly broke every taboo, took the names of five different husbands, and nearly followed the tragic end of her great hero, the outlaw queen Belle Starr.

Dark and daring, meticulously researched and mostly true, I Want to Die in My Boots is a lyrical, unconventional literary novel that gives voice to the unheard in a long-forgotten world. After leaving Montana for a third husband and the ranch she’d always wanted, Belle settles in Saskatchewan, before spending her final years in Penticton, reading tarot cards for strangers.

Written a century after her arrest, this fictional tribute to Belle Jane, an unsung hero in Canada’s west, is inventive yet thoughtful, a work of Prairie literary fiction that takes an edgy twist to history. I Want to Die in My Boots will appeal to readers of Annie Proulx, Sheila Watson, Robert Kroetsch, and Maggie O’Farrell, and to viewers of Yellowstone and The Power of the Dog.

p class=“biography”>Natalie Appleton is an award-winning writer whose stories have appeared in publications around the world, including The New York Times. Natalie won Prairie Fire’s 2016 Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Award, and her prose has been longlisted for the CBC Creative Nonfiction Contest. Natalie is a graduate of the University of Regina School of Journalism and the MA in Creative Writing (Narrative Non-fiction) program at City, University London, UK. In her former life as a journalist, she worked at newspapers across the Prairies. Natalie lives in the Okanagan, BC, with her husband and two sons.

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