Sand Hills, Saskatchewan, is a region of the prairies that is unique, an expanse of shifting sand dunes interrupted by patches of green vegetation, small lakes, and saline flats. Foreign yet familiar, Sand Hills is the extraordinarily vivid place threaded through Jacqueline Baker's highly praised first collection of short fiction, eight fresh and true stories of prairie life. Baker writes with confidence and unvarnished honesty, and like Flannery O'Connor or Bonnie Burnard, she has the rare ability to make the familiar brilliant and finely understood. Hers are universal themes of the tensionsof family life, of relationships defined by what isn't said, rather than what is, and of our connection to a past that may be real or imagined. Reading A Hard Witching is like entering a complete and perfectly detailed world with each story-worlds that are not easy to leave and even harder to forget.

A Hard Witching & Other Stories

Literature & Fiction

Baker, Jacqueline

World Literature

HarperflamingoCanada

Jacqueline Baker’s highly acclaimed short story collection,A Hard Witching and Other Stories, marked the debut of an extraordinary literary talent. Proclaimed by reviewers to be “a rural J.D. Salinger,” Baker received the prestigious Danuta Gleed Award and her collection was listed among Maclean’s Top 10 Books of the Year.The Horseman’s Graves returns us to the harsh locale of Sand Hills on the Saskatchewan-Alberta border, where Baker unfolds a tale of a small German immigrant community caught between the promise of this new land and the weight of a European past, with its hatred, fear and old-country superstitions. Lathias is a half-breed farmhand, a young loner who becomes the unofficial guardian to the Schoff boy, a golden child until a terrible farm accident scars his face and his mind. Both boys are drawn to Elisabeth, a savagely beautiful girl, whose stepfather, Leo, is the local scapegrace, a man whose cruelty is both a source of amusement and shame to the townspeople. When Elisabeth, watched only by the Schoff boy, falls through the ice into the river, no one foresees how it will be the end—and the beginning—of everything. A novel so lyrical and hypnotic that it begs to be read aloud,The Horseman’s Graves is a pitch-perfect rendering of small-town immigrant life. Told through the unforgettable narrative voice of a seeall neighbour, it is filled with memorable characters: a blustering, pious priest; a mysterious “witch” faith healer; the town busybody; a fearful young farm wife who is virtually worked to death. An extraordinarily accomplished work, The Horseman’s Graves is a profound testament to our universal search for love and redemption.

The Horseman's Graves

Contemporary

Phyllis Bruce Books

A stunning novel of passion, sin and redemption, The Horseman’s Graves returns to the harsh locale of Sand Hills on the Saskatchewan-Alberta border, the location for Jacqueline Baker’s multiple award-winning short story collection A Hard Witching and Other Stories. Speaking through the narrative voice of a see-all neighbour and filling her story with memorable characters―a blustering, pious priest; a mysterious “witch” faith healer; the town busybody; a fearful young farm wife who is virtually worked to death―Baker unfolds a tale of a small German farming community where the failures of one generation are passed on to the next.

The Horsemans Graves

Literary

Sand Hills, Saskatchewan, is a region of the prairies that is unique, an expanse of shifting sand dunes interrupted by patches of green vegetation, small lakes, and saline flats. Foreign yet familiar, Sand Hills is the extraordinarily vivid place threaded through Jacqueline Baker’s highly praised first collection of short fiction, eight fresh and true stories of prairie life. Baker writes with confidence and unvarnished honesty, and like Flannery O’Connor or Bonnie Burnard, she has the rare ability to make the familiar brilliant and finely understood. Hers are universal themes of the tensionsof family life, of relationships defined by what isn’t said, rather than what is, and of our connection to a past that may be real or imagined. Reading A Hard Witching is like entering a complete and perfectly detailed world with each story―worlds that are not easy to leave and even harder to forget.

A Hard Witching And Other Stories

Genre Fiction

Phyllis Bruce Books Perennial

In the spring of 1936, horror writer H.P. Lovecraft is broke, living alone in a creaky old house and deathly ill. At the edge of a nervous breakdown, he hires a personal assistant, Arthor Crandle. As the novel opens, Crandle arrives at Lovecraft's home with no knowledge of the writer or his work but is soon drawn into his distinctly unnerving world: the malevolent presence that hovers on the landing; the ever-shining light from Lovecraft's study, invisible from the street; and visions in the night of a white-clad girl in the walled garden. Add to this the arrival of a beautiful woman who may not be exactly what she seems, and Crandle is pulled deeper into the strange world of H.P. Lovecraft (a man known to Crandle only through letters, signed "Ech-Pi"), until Crandle begins to unravel the dark secret at its heart. A brilliantly written, compelling and deeply creepy novel, The Broken Hours is an irresistible literary ghost story.

The Broken Hours

HarperAvenue

In the spring of 1936, horror writer H.P. Lovecraft is broke, living alone in a creaky old house and deathly ill. At the edge of a nervous breakdown, he hires a personal assistant, Arthor Crandle. As the novel opens, Crandle arrives at Lovecraft’s home with no knowledge of the writer or his work but is soon drawn into his distinctly unnerving world: the malevolent presence that hovers on the landing; the ever-shining light from Lovecraft’s study, invisible from the street; and visions in the night of a white-clad girl in the walled garden. Add to this the arrival of a beautiful woman who may not be exactly what she seems, and Crandle is pulled deeper into the strange world of the horror writer (a man known to Crandle only through letters, signed “Ech-Pi”), until Crandle begins to unravel the dark secret at its heart.
A brilliantly written, compelling and deeply creepy novel, The Broken Hours is an irresistible literary ghost story.

Harper-perennial

In the cold spring of 1936, Arthor Crandle, down-on-his luck and desperate for work, accepts a position in Providence, Rhode Island, as a live-in secretary/assistant for an unnamed shut-in. He arrives at the gloomy colonial-style house to discover that his strange employer is an author of disturbing, bizarre fiction. Health issues have confined him to his bedroom, where he is never to be disturbed. But the writer, who Crandle knows only as Ech-Pi,” refuses to meet him, communicating only by letters left on a table outside his room. Soon the home reveals other unnerving peculiarities. There is an ominous presence Crandle feels on the main stairwell. Light shines out underneath the door of the writer’s room, but is invisible from the street. It becomes increasingly clear there is something not right about the house or its occupant. Haunting visions of a young girl in a white nightgown wandering the walled-in garden behind the house motivate Crandle to investigate the circumstances of his employer’s dark family history. Meanwhile, the unsettling aura of the house pulls him into a world increasingly cut off from reality, into black depths, where an unspeakable secret lies waiting.

The Broken Hours: A Novel of H. P. Lovecraft

United States

Talos

The Broken Hours: A Novel of H.P. Lovecraft

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Baker, Jacqueline. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Baker, Jacqueline

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Baker, Jacqueline. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A Hard Witching & Other Stories

The Horseman's Graves

The Horsemans Graves

A Hard Witching And Other Stories

The Broken Hours

The Broken Hours

The Broken Hours: A Novel of H. P. Lovecraft

The Broken Hours: A Novel of H.P. Lovecraft