Echoes of Violence

Sandra Birdsell walked so that Miriam Toews could run. Both Mennonite writers from rural Manitoba — Birdsell from the generation before Toews — they chronicled the lives of girls and women from that funny diasporic religious group to which I too belong, a group that has taken on giant proportions in our national literature.

I discovered Birdsell’s first book, Night Travellers, in my twenties, in the middle of the boring and beautiful act of rediscovering one’s culture after time away from it. Where has this been all my life?! I mentally shouted, alone on my mattress in a third-floor Winnipeg walk‑up. Following a dreamy, hurting Métis-Mennonite family from the fictional town of Agassiz, the linked stories are soft and electric, measured and urgent, and they are honest. I tore through her second collection, Ladies of the House, with the same zeal.

I hated to admit it, but reading her debut novel, The Missing...