Who By Fire - Hardcover

FRED STENSON is the author of eight novels, including The Great Karoo and The Trade, which was nominated for the 2000 Scotiabank Giller Prize and won the inaugural Grant MacEwan Writer's Award, the City of Edmonton Book Prize, and the Writers Guild of Alberta's Georges Bugnet Novel Award. He has also written scripts for over 140 produced films and videos. He writes a regular humour column for Alberta Views Magazine. He was raised on a farm in the Alberta foothills north of Chief Mountain. Stenson lives in Cochrane, Alberta.

Nominated for the Alberta Readers’ Choice Award
Nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award

“Suffer in silence no more. This was the motivation behind Cochrane author Fred Stenson’s new novel, Who by Fire, a fictional, yet very personal account of a family living in rural Alberta in the late ‘50s-early-‘60s next to a sour gas processing plant.”
—Cochrane Eagle
 
“Fred Stenson, has just release his 18th book, Who by Fire, a novel that will stir inner emotions in the reader. . . . This is a must read for any Western Canadian.”
―Cochrane Times
 
“Who by Fire is a multi-layered, deeply moving novel. . . . Stenson has a profound connection to, and understanding of, Alberta—both its history and its culture. . . . Who by Fire is a valuable insight into what the province has done, where it’s going, and what might happen in future collisions between industry and community.”
―Penticton Western News
 
“Who By Fire is a story that is uniquely Albertan.”
—St. Albert Leader

“Fred Stenson’s unsettling, cautionary new novel . . . tells the story of a society irrevocably altered by change. The novel’s strength is in the unsentimental way it depicts how poorly equipped the Ryders are to struggle against these pernicious influences or even to fully comprehend their impact. . . . An intimately framed tale of classically tragic dimensions in which individuals are ensnared by larger forces—albeit of human, rather than divine, design.”
—Quill & Quire
 
“Who by Fire reads like the work of someone who knows Alberta intimately—its booms, busts and echoes. It’s a generational tale grounded in social critique, tragic and uncompromising, and [Stenson’s] most powerful yet.”
—FFWD (Calgary)

“On the page Stenson is like Frank Sinatra in a stetson—smooth and pitch perfect. And if details give literature its staying power, Stenson is writing for the ages.”
—Caroline Adderson, The Globe and Mail

“Intriguing, fast-paced and a delight. . . . Who by Fire is the biography of Alberta. The story we all live today.”
—Calgary Herald
 
“Alberta's Fred Stenson . . . has done Canadian literature a service by producing the long-awaited oilsands novel. . . . He portrays a corporate world in which oil companies have become better at speaking in soothing tones and issuing mild mea culpas, all the while speeding up their efforts to pump every last drop. And though he holds out some hope for personal healing from psychological wounds, he's clear that neither the oil companies nor the Alberta government are likely to change course.”
—Winnipeg Free Press