An intriguing story of a woman and artist in the grip of a major personal crisis and whose life becomes intertwined with that of her extraordinary, great grandmother, also called Kate. Written with great delicacy and acute understanding of the complexities of mind and heart, and enriched by the importance of film and painting in the heroine's life, Kate Wake offers an original, multi-genre narrative of woman in search of historical and contemporary truths. A novel as contemporary as the present moment, it is also a book deepened by connections with the past. Accessible, lyrical, factual, simple and complex, the writing conveys the many dimensions of the heroine's experiences and feelings. Kate Wake is a novel that narrates a working-through of loss by an individual compelled to return to the original scene (of loss), a sort of underworld rule by sleep, memory and the unconscious.

Winner of the Robert Kroetsch Creative Writing Award (University of Manitoba), Mariianne Mays Wiebe is a writer, editor and poet whose work has been published in Border Crossings, Prairie Fire, Herizons, and other magazines, including PhaenEx (the Journal of the Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture Association). She was co-founder and co-editor of Tarts, an arts and culture magazine, and for a number of years taught creative writing at the University of Winnipeg. JackPine Press published her poetry chapbook Umbrella Suites, and her play The Apprentice was produced at the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival. She lives in Winnipeg

Mariianne Mays Wiebe's profile page

'[T]he heart ofKate Wakelies in its exploration of love, grief, and the reconciliation of loss through art.' ...'The inner worlds we create for ourselves and the mysteries of the human psyche are central to the novel. One of the major settings in the book is the Hill, a so-called lunatic asylum in the 1920s. Through various characters, Wiebe explores the treatment of mental illness in Canadian history, paying specific attention to the institutionalization of women. Wiebes work is a lot like the women who grace its pages: complicated, whip-smart, and truly unconventional.' The Montreal Review of Books, 2020