The Secret of the Northern Lights [Paperback]

The Secret of the Northern Lights continues the chronicle which has delighted thousands and outraged a select few since Silas Ermineskin first appropriated the English language in 1977 with Dance Me Outside.

The Secret of the Northern Lights continues the chronicle which has delighted thousands and outraged a select few since Silas Ermineskin first appropriated the English language in 1977 in Dance Me Outside. As part of his apprenticeship to Mad Etta, medicine woman on the Ermineskin reserve, Silas learns a whole bunch of inside information and shares it with us. I learned that everybody got a past that can be used against them, Etta tells him. But, more interesting I learned that if you haven't got a past that can be used against you, you haven't lived enough to be any use to anybody.

When he's out on the road with Brother Frank Fencepost, the Trickster incarnate, we join a slapstick First Nations tour through the follies of our culture. Sacred white buffalo get kidnapped and cloned, Levantine radicals are provided with Ermineskin identities, and Frank and Silas represent the Nation of Hobbema at the Commonwealth Games.

Humour, as always, is the leveler. Nothing is taken too seriously, nothing is sacred. Yet serious, even tragic, things do happen and sacred things are accomplished, while Kinsella -- as if incidentally--twists a skewer again and again through the cant, sentimentality and glib indignations of political correctness.

The Secret of the Northern Lights is certain to challenge and delight, as well as enlighten.

One of Canada's most renowned and beloved writers, W. P. Kinsella continues to delight and mesmerize his readers with twelve new Hobbema stories in The Secret of the Northern Lights. This collection follows in the footsteps of his classic titles Dance Me Outside, Shoeless Joe, Born Indian, and The Fencepost Chronicles. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, and currently residing in British Columbia, Kinsella is known for his compelling insight and dazzling wit, while the translation of his work into such films as Field of Dreams, Dance Me Outside, and Lieberman in Love have made him an internationally recognized figure.

Kinsella is the winner of the following awards: Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship; Books in Canada First Novel Award; Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour; Canada Authors Association Prize for Fiction; Order of Canada, Periodical Marketers Award.