Five Little Indians author Michelle Good to release next novel, Eliza Sunshine, in fall 2025
Eliza Sunshine is inspired by the stories of Indigenous women in Good's life
Five Little Indians author Michelle Good is releasing a new novel, Eliza Sunshine, in fall 2025.
Eliza Sunshine is inspired by the stories of Indigenous women in her life. The book is being released by Random House Canada.
Good is a Cree writer and lawyer, and a member of Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. Her poems, short stories and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies across Canada.
Five Little Indians won Canada Reads 2022, as well as the 2020 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction and the 2021 Amazon Canada First Novel Award. The book was also on the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist and the 2020 Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and was the #1 bestselling Canadian book in 2021 and 2022.
Good's collection of essays, Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada, made the shortlist for this year's Balsillie Prize for Public Policy.
Eliza Sunshine is inspired by the lives of Michelle's mother and her great-grandmother, who was the niece of Chief Big Bear.
Good's great grandmother lived on ancestral lands in what is now northwestern Saskatchewan, but like the rest of Big Bear's Cree band, she was pushed out of her home after the Frog Lake incident — when the Indian agent and several white people who had been attempting to starve them into accepting the treaty were killed.
She went first to Montana, before being sent on a boxcar to the newly formed reserve located just south of Edmonton, the Montana Band of Cree. Living there until her son was able to bring her back to Saskatchewan, she was an expert herbalist who provided a continuous line of knowledge to the community.
Martha Eliza was Good's mother, who was sent to a residential school near enough to the reserve that she could come home for summers, which she spent in her grandmother's company. She wanted to make her way in the world, and was able to persuade the authorities to allow her to attend public school. When she failed the mandatory TB test, she spent three years in a sanatorium instead, but she was still determined to follow her dreams.
Eliza was able to secure a clean bill of health and permission to travel to Toronto, where she was trained as a Mothercraft nanny and then qualified for a scholarship to study nursing in New Zealand. Rather than accept university placement offers when she returned, she married a white man, with whom she had five children.
In Eliza Sunshine, Good explores what her great-grandmother taught her mother about surviving colonial violence without sacrificing her identity. She also examines her mother's struggle to protect herself and her children, and how this caused its own level of damage, as consequently Good and her siblings grew up cut off from their roots.
"When my mother knew she'd lost her fight with cancer, she and I were sitting together. Looking away, even though it was just the two of us, she said, to no-one, to everyone, to me, 'Someone tell my story.' As I enter the third act of my life, it has become the story I need to tell next, before time runs out," Good said in a Random House Canada press release.
"This is not only the story of my mother, but every Indigenous woman touched by the dehumanizing influence of colonialism."
The heart of Eliza Sunshine surrounds a question that is yet to be solved: how did Indigenous women become disposable, and why do they remain that way?
"I'm so proud to be working with her," said Anne Collins, Random House Canada's executive editor and vice-president of Penguin Random House Canada, in the press release.
"Be ready to be haunted even more deeply in this new book, as Michelle brings us face to face with all the forces that conspire to abandon the bodies of Indigenous women in a Manitoba dump."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
