Shortlisted, Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction

1971. Lilac Welsh lives an isolated life with her parents at Rough Rock on the Winnipeg River. Her father, Kal, stern and controlling, has built his wealth by designing powerful guns and ammunition. He’s on the cusp of producing a .50 calibre assault rifle that can shoot down an airplane with a single bullet, when a young stranger named Gavin appears at their door, wanting to meet him before enlisting for the war in Vietnam. Gavin’s arrival sparks an emotional explosion in Lilac’s home and inspires her to begin her own life as a journalist, reporting on the war that’s making her family rich.

The Gunsmith’s Daughter is both a coming-of-age story and an allegorical novel about Canada-US relations. Psychologically and politically astute, and gorgeously written, Margaret Sweatman’s portrait of a brilliant gunsmith and his eighteen-year-old daughter tells an engrossing story of ruthless ambition, and one young woman’s journey toward independence.

Margaret Sweatman is a novelist, playwright, and singer-lyricist. She is the author of four previously published novels, Fox, Sam & Angie, When Alice Lay Down With Peter, and The Players, for which she has won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction, the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, the Carol Shields Winnipeg Award, and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year.

Sweatman's plays have been produced by Prairie Theatre Exchange, Popular Theatre Alliance, and the Guelph Spring Festival. She has performed with her own Broken Songs Band and with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra, and the National Academy Orchestra. With her husband, composer Glenn Buhr, Sweatman won a 2006 Genie Award for Best Song in Canadian Film.

Margaret Sweatman's profile page

• Short-listed, Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction

“Throughout the novel, dialogue sparkles with authenticity and wit comparable to the novels of Patrick deWitt (The Sisters Bothers, French Exit). Sweatman’s unpredictable but convincing snippets of conversation go a long a long way in revealing the characters and their relationships, particularly the complex relationship between Lilac and her father.”

<i>Winnipeg Free Press</i>

“The Gunsmith’s Daughter, possessing the forward thrust of a whodunit, makes for compulsive reading and is clearly the work of a seasoned writer who knows what she’s doing every step of the way.”

<i>Atlantic Books Today</i>

“In this beautifully written and tightly plotted novel, Margaret Sweatman gives us a searing look into ourselves. Lilac Welsh is faced with a moral dilemma. She loves her father but is conflicted about the way he makes his living — he makes guns that kill people. Set in the time of the Vietnam War, Lilac's dilemma is Canada's: we criticize U.S. foreign policy, even while our economic well-being remains entangled in America's. The Gunsmith's Daughter delivers uncomfortable home truths as sharply and poetically as George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man.”

Wayne Grady, author of <i>The Good Father</i>

“An astute and subtle interrogation of a young woman's struggle to forge her own path amidst a bloody conflict and in the shadow of the sometimes wildly profitable business of other people's suffering. Margaret Sweatman is a writer of deep emotional insight, and in Lilac Welsh she has created a vivid, complex character caught between warring currents of ambition and familial loyalty. There is a cold fire that burns through this novel.”

Omar El Akkad, author of <i>What Strange Paradise</i>

“I was thrilled by The Gunsmith's Daughter, by how cinematic and engrossing it is, what big questions it asks.”

Joan Thomas, author of <i>Five Wives</i>