The Strangers

Katherena Vermette is a Red River Metis (Michif) writer from Treaty 1 territory, the heart of the Metis Nation, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. She is also author of the book of poetry North End Love Songs, the novel The Break, and the children's graphic novel series A Girl Called Echo.

The Strangers is a unique and essential triumph of a novel. It is revelatory in its artistry--in its constellating of family against violent separation, in its austere poetics of voice and consciousness. Katherena Vermette has proven once again that she is among the most gifted and relevant writers of our time: someone with everything to teach us about the telling of neces - David Chariandy, author of I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter "Katherena Vermette's The Strangers is a deeply moving story of how colonial institutions continue to bear down on and disrupt the lives of Indigenous women and girls. It is a powerful collective portrait of struggle and resistance, of what it's like to be in an Indigenous body in twenty-first century Canada. In the end, it adds up to an engrossingly written ode to another kind of care, one against the grain of suffering. A brilliant follow-up!" - Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of A History of My Brief Body "Reminiscent of the hardscrabble tales of the Metis in the Road Allowance days, Vermette offers up a beautiful, raw testament to those living on the margins. Brilliantly weaving the lives of the [the characters] into stories within stories within stories, Vermette's confident, understated prose walks the reader through the unforgiving reality of the descendants of those who stood with Riel and Dumont, grasping for survival in a world committed to a long-established campaign of dispossession. Cathartic and disturbing, The Strangers offers vital insight into the colonial brutality that still haunts the lives of the Metis." - 2021 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Jury (Rebecca Fisseha, Michelle Good, and Steven Price)