The Prairie Wife

Chaddie married the man her heart didn't choose, and now she's writing letters from a prairie ranch house about what she's gotten herself into. Theobald Gustav, with his sophistication and city ways, is gone replaced by Duncan Argyll McKail and the vast, wind-scoured nothing of the Canadian plains. Through her correspondence with friend Matilda Anne, we watch a woman who fell into marriage before she fell in love trying to figure out if she can learn to belong somewhere she never intended to be. The prose is sharp, funny, and surprisingly tender: Chaddie mocks her own circumstances even as she grapples with genuine loneliness, describes shooting her own duck-gun with disastrous results, and slowly, achingly begins to discover who she actually is rather than who she was supposed to become. It's a portrait of early twentieth-century womanhood with all its quiet constraints and unexpected freedoms, told in a voice that feels like a friend sitting across from you, wine in hand, telling you absolutely everything.