Guy Vanderhaeghe

Author photo: Liam Richards, Globe and Mail.

Saskatoon novelist Guy Vanderhaeghe has just published another novel, A Good Man, the third in his "literary western" trilogy. The first was The Englishman's Boy, (1997) portrays 1920s Hollywood and the infamous Cypress Hills massacre.

In Pechorin's Journal, Max Cairnduff calls it "a book of history, myth and the role of both in shaping nations." This book was Saskatchewan Book of the Year and was short-listed for the Giller and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

The second of the trilogy, The Last Crossing, was reviewed in The Observer by Salley Vickers in 2004. She says that Vanderhaeghe's description of it as a literary western "sells the book short," and that the author "is adroit at hitting just the right psychological note." The praise goes on, including terms like "emotionally intelligent," and "a treat to read." It won the Saskatoon Book Award and was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

In the Globe and Mail in September 2011, Andrew Pyper, himself a novelist, calls Vanderhaeghe "the best all-round novelist at work in Canada today." The book, he says, is a "towering achievement."

This author began his literary career with a Governor General's Award for fiction, for his initial collection of short stories, Man Descending (1982). His first novel, My Present Age, was published in 2004, and was a finalist for the Booker. Homesick (1989) won the City of Toronto Book Award.

He has also written a play and contributed to many journals. In 2010, he gave the Trudeau Lecture at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. The title was "Apprehending the Past: History versus the Historical Novel."

Vanderhaeghe has been honoured with many awards, including the Saskatchewan Order of Merit, the Order of Canada, and has been made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has also won the Harbourfront Literary Prize and the Timothy Findley Award (Writers' Trust of Canada.) He was a Trudeau Fellow in 2008.