Fox, Margaret Sweatman’s debut novel, is a phenomenal work of historical and postmodern fiction. When Fox burst onto the literary scene in 1991, it was clear a singular talent was at work. Decades later, Fox’s deft examination of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike is a startling reminder of the dangers of xenophobia, bigotry, greed, and fear. In a novel of remarkably vivid, kinetic power, the collision of the wealthy and working classes after the First World War becomes a backdrop for the timeless conflict between desire and human idealism.
In addition, Alison Calder’s new essay examines the impact of Fox and its contribution to the landscape of Canadian literature.

Margaret Sweatman is a novelist, playwright, and singer-lyricist. She is the author of four previously published novels, Fox, Sam & Angie, When Alice Lay Down With Peter, and The Players, for which she has won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction, the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, the Carol Shields Winnipeg Award, and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year.

Sweatman's plays have been produced by Prairie Theatre Exchange, Popular Theatre Alliance, and the Guelph Spring Festival. She has performed with her own Broken Songs Band and with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra, and the National Academy Orchestra. With her husband, composer Glenn Buhr, Sweatman won a 2006 Genie Award for Best Song in Canadian Film.

Margaret Sweatman's profile page

• Winner, McNally Robinson Award for Manitoba Book of the Year

Fox is a considerable achievement for Margaret Sweatman.... She has managed to find that precarious balance between eth­ics and aesthetics, between moral vision and the hedonistic pleasures of literary postmodernism. For that reason, Fox is a significant contribution to the literature of the Canadian West.

--NeWest Review

Fox belongs among important Canadian historical novels such as In the Skin of a Lion, The Temptations of Big Bear, Icefields, and Alias Grace.

--Quill & Quire

Fox is a book one dreams of reading. It moves with elegant surprises, with cold passion, through the intricacies of love and language and politics. The Winnipeg General Strike becomes an alchemist’s retort in which lives are transformed by the infinite varieties of desire. Margaret Sweatman speaks wonders from a world we thought we knew.

--Robert Kroetsch