Luna is the story of three prairie women at the crossroads of their lives. Rhea, still strong and proud at 80, contemplates her death, and her pioneer life, the years of loneliness she endured, tears seeping from her body while she kneaded her loaves of bread. Selena, Rhea’s niece, struggling to come to terms with her teenaged daughter’s pregnancy, wonders if her way of life is changing forever. And Diane, Selena’s sister, until now a woman cloaked in the busy fabric of farming life suppers, chores and gardening, leaves for the city on a search for freedom, for identity and for self. Each of them is inexorably a part of the vast prairie landscape, its seemingly spare geography in reality as rich and varied as the inner lives of its inhabitants.
Luna resonates with our constant, passionate and often mystical struggle to love the land, conquer it, abandon it, and most of all, rediscover ourselves within it.
SHARON BUTALA is an award-winning and bestselling author of both fiction and non-fiction. Her classic book The Perfection of the Morning was a #1 bestseller and a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. Fever, a short story collection, won the 1992 Authors’ Award for Paperback Fiction and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book (Canada and Caribbean region). Butala is a recipient of the Marian Engel Award, the Saskatchewan Order of Merit, and the 2012 Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence. In 2002 she became an Officer of the Order of Canada. She lives in Calgary, Alberta.