On the windswept Saskatchewan prairie of 1925, a young Ukrainian woman crosses an ocean into an arranged marriage — and into the long, quiet reckoning between the duty she was raised to honor and the life she dares to want.
Anna Dyak is nineteen when she leaves the only village she has ever known, carrying a single trunk and a photograph of the man she has agreed to marry. The prairie that greets her is vast and unforgiving — and so, at first, is the life she has chosen. Drawing on the real history of Ukrainian settlement on the Canadian plains, Ceone Fenn tells the story of a marriage built not on love but on necessity, and of the slow, stubborn way two strangers learn to make a home.
With the emotional precision of a writer who spent three decades listening to people's hardest seasons, To Reap the Finest Wheat asks what we owe the families who shape us, and what we owe ourselves. It is a novel about endurance — but also about the small, daily acts of tenderness that turn endurance into a life.
Twelve discussion questions on duty, displacement, and the marriages we grow into — plus historical context on the 1925 prairie. Read on the page or print for your meeting.
“A luminous, deeply felt debut — the prairie has rarely been written with such tenderness.” Reader review · Goodreads