This Bright Dust

Berkhout (Why Birds Sing) offers a stirring tale of the Great Depression on Canada’s Alberta prairie. In 1939, 26-year-old farmer Abel Dodds is barely surviving in the forgotten town of Grayley, where a drought has displaced many of his neighbors. Abel has stayed behind to look out for Una Wishart, his former classmate and secret crush, who lives on a nearby farm with her eight-year-old son, Toby. When news comes that the king and queen of England will tour Canada by train in the spring, Una fills Toby’s head with ideas that the royals will stop in Grayley. Abel, irate that the pomp and circumstance will do nothing to help the dispossessed, vows to protest the tour. As the royals’ arrival looms, Berkhout builds tension out of Abel’s outrage and Una’s need for hope. Along the way, she portrays the beauty of flowering wheat fields and the danger of dust storms in stark prose, and she grounds the narrative in themes of neighborliness and self-sacrifice. Readers will be moved. Agent: Sam Haywood, Transatlantic Agency. (Sept.)