When Donna Whalen is stabbed thirty-one times in her home on Empire Avenue in St. John’s, her friends, family, and neighbours believe the culprit to be her abusive boyfriend, Sheldon Troke. But the evidence is circumstantial, the testimonies tainted by personal bias and attempts at deception. Police and prosecutors face a daunting challenge, and the course of justice, with all its intricacies and failings, takes many unpredictable turns before the truth is finally revealed.

In this extraordinary novel, Michael Winter has mined the records of Sheldon’s trial—thousands of pages of court transcripts, police wiretaps, newspaper reports, private letters and diary entries—and distilled their raw, naked truth into a mesmerizing work of documentary fiction that captures the myriad voices of the people involved.

Michael Winter is the author of The Big Why (winner of the Drummer General's Award and nominated for Ontario's Trillium Book Award and the Atlantic Book Awards Thomas Head Raddall Fiction Prize), This All Happened (winner of the Winterset Award and nominated for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize), the short-story collection One Last Good Look, and more recently the novels The Architects Are Here and The Death of Donna Whalen.

Michael Winter's profile page

"Winter has produced one of the best documentary accounts of a Canadian crime ever written" - Edmonton Journal

"Extraordinary... Winter has enacted some of the most powerful storytelling of his career" - The Globe and Mail

"The Death of Donna Whalen weaves its spell in small increments, one character's voice giving way to another's and then another's, an immersion in the low life that pulses with veracity...one of the best documentary accounts of a Canadian crime ever written" - The Vancouver Sun

“[Winter’s] respect for the ‘characters’ who have given him his story and lent him their voices feels enormous and the burden of his awareness of Donna Whalen as a real human being who lived, was loved by many and died horrifically, brings an entirely new kind of Michael Winter to the page. . . A genuine murder mystery. . . . It’s a bold approach from top to bottom. For a fabulist of Winter’s gifts, it shows amazing faith in the power of story itself, the sheer ability of raw human character to transfix us. In stepping back from centre stage and turning the spotlight entirely on this devastating array of intersecting lives and deaths, Winter has enacted some of the most powerful storytelling of his career.” - Lynn Coady, The Globe and Mail

“The liveliest literary experiment of the season. . . . Suppressing his voice, Winter makes full use of an impeccable ear. . . . Freely juggling voices drawn from three million words of transcribed testimony . . . Winter lays them out in an artful pattern. . . . As per the author’s intentions, it sounds like nothing that has ever been heard in Canadian literature.” - John Barber, The Globe and Mail

“[A] compelling reconstruction that gives a raw jolt to the conventional novel form. With the source material as a given, the selection, arrangement and editing become all-important. Winter has done an exemplary job in this regard, orchestrating the various speakers into a tragic chorus. . . . We recognize, in the abrupt vernacular of Winter’s oral history, universal human passions and relations being expressed with direct immediacy.” - Toronto Star

“A moody and affecting novel. . . .Winter transposed quoted speech into the third person . . . preserving each individual voice and showcasing the rich linguistic distinctiveness of Newfoundland English. . . . The Death of Donna Whalen stands on its own as a literary effort that conjures a potent sensation of disquiet out of the grim details of an actual tragedy.” - Quill & Quire