Michelle Good is a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. After working with Indigenous organizations for 25 years, she obtained her law degree as a 43-year-old single mom and then spent 14 years advocating for residential school survivors. She earned her MFA in creative writing while still practicing law. Her debut and best-selling novel, Five Little Indians, earned the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Amazon First Novel Award, and the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. Her bestselling book, Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada, was shortlisted for the Balsillie Prize for Public Policy. Last year she was made a Member of the Order of Canada.
An instant national bestseller, Eliza Sunshine begins with Eliza returning home thin and listless from her first year at residential school. Her grandmother, Swan, begins to heal Eliza with long prairie walks, confident that the land will restore Eliza’s energy. Along the way, Swan tells her own stories of adversity in dealing with encroaching settlers. Decades later, when Eliza’s daughter, Ella, returns home from university with braids and a beaded headband, Eliza is aghast because she had worked so hard to free herself from the oppression that came with being seen as Cree. Ella has her own ideas and, when tragedy strikes, she must decide how to deal in the aftermath and find her way to preserve the family’s history.