Winner of the Cover Design Award and Shortlisted for the Fiction Trade Book of the Year Award at the 2016 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!
Shortlisted for the Second Annual Kobo Emerging Writer Prize - Literary Fiction!

When her family's car goes through the ice on Rainy Lake one cold March day in 1962, six-year-old Rebecca Archer is the only person her father is able to pull from the sinking vehicle. But as Rebecca grows up in a farmhouse haunted by the absence of her mother and baby brother, raised by a man left nearly paralyzed with grief, she wonders if her father really did save her after all.

Eventually, though, Rebecca finds solace in the company of her friends: Chuck, the sensitive son of a violently abusive father; and Lissie, an Aboriginal girl being raised alone by a perfectionist white mother. As these three young people protect and support one another, Rebecca discovers that by saving Chuck and Lissie, she may also save herself.

In her debut novel, Wendi Stewart tells the luminous, deeply imagined story of a young woman's hard-won triumph over heartbreaking personal tragedy.

Wendi Stewart grew up on a farm in Northwestern Ontario and now makes her home in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. A graduate of the University of Manitoba and the Humber College creative writing program, she has been published in The Antigonish Review, The Leaf and the Owen Sound Sun Times. She currently has columns appearing in the Fort Frances Times and the Chronicle Herald. Meadowlark is her first novel.

Wendi Stewart's profile page

• Winner, Best Book Cover at the Alberta Book Publishing Awards
• Nominated, Kobo Emerging Writer Prize
• Nominated, Best Trade Fiction at the Alberta Book Publishing Awards

Praise for Meadowlark:
"Wendi Stewart's Meadowlark is lyrical and vivid, startlingly fresh writing about childhood and loss, decaying dreams, bravery and the everyday brutality that is sometimes visited upon the damaged and the innocent alike. It is about the fast, inviolate friendships that see us through. Stewart creates characters that will last. Here is ultra-wise and propulsive writing about all the small dramatic moments that loom large and make us quake."
~ Lisa Moore, author of Caught and February
"Stewart's story reflects self-discovery in the midst of suffering. Meadowlark is a novel of tragedy infused with hope and survival."
~ Kirsten Parucha, Quill & Quire
"Wendi Stewart has a smart and compelling heroine in Rebecca Archer."
~ Chelsea Rooney, National Post
"Read it for Wendi Stewart's powerful evocation of loss and for the hope held throughout that these orphans will find some escape."
~ Jade Colbert, The Globe and Mail