• Age: 16 to 18
• Grade: 11 to 12

In Edmonton, Ronnie learns what it is to be a young Indigenous woman, almost-alone in the city; unable to hear herself over its noise, see through the glare of its lights to find the ground beneath her feet. Stories of addiction, self-discovery, and the love of a good friend come together to form ʔbédayine (it's spirit), Kaitlyn Purcell's breathtaking debut.

Kaitlyn Purcell's profile page

• Short-listed, Indigenous Voices Award
• The Metatron Prize for Rising Authors

Kaitlyn Purcell (Smith’s Landing First Nation) is a Denesuline writer/artist and member of the Writing Revolution in Place creative research collective (University of Alberta). Currently, she is an English PhD student within creative and critical Indigenous studies at the University of Calgary. Her research centres arts and literature as theoretical practice exploring gender/sexuality and multi-modal creative productions (creative writing, visual, digital, and installation arts) as praxis towards healing and resistance. Her debut novella, ʔbédayine, was selected by guest judges CA Conrad and Anne Boyer as the winner of the 2018 Metatron Prize for Emerging Authors and was published fall 2019.

"This book took my breath away.”
- ANNE BOYER, author of The Undying, winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize

“We bear witness here to the rising song of Kaitlyn Purcell’s poetics in the guise of ʔbédayine and come to know at once a new voice to be welcomed into the circle within Indigenous literatures. At once a collective that details ecological destruction, addiction, the grit of the inner-city, the dim lights of an Edmonton bus, and a hauntingly detailed relationship, Purcell’s writing is rich, complex, and yet wholly invitational. From Fort Smith to Edmonton, the narrator of ʔbédayine shreds through memories like the tornado that haunts her dreamscapes from sexual assaults into blissful queer embraces. We ghost through the “phantom[s] of her words” into a razed field, a “famine for wildflowers,” to the Rockies which become “tombstones of [the] Earth” all the while we are constantly asked to query why the world is always ending within and without the body of an Indigenous female narrator coming undone. An absolute must read!”
- JOSHUA WHITEHEAD, author of Jonny Appleseed

“Fall into these fractured pages; there is a lot of getting back up with a vengeance in here! These young women are my new heroes, navigating the world with a grace they define. Kaitlyn Purcell’s extraordinary book has such clarity for the blurriness, for the framing of shame, and for the beauty of friends who always have your back. I absolutely love this book!”
- CACONRAD, author of While Standing in Line for Death