Best Selling Books by Maggie Siggins

ufeffAward-winning author Maggie Siggins returns with her first work of fiction. Scattered Bones is a story of the complicated, fragile and sometimes fatal relations between Indigenous people and settlers in Northern Saskatchewan in the 1920s. Aboriginal spiritual traditions are beginning to cross paths with the construction of a residential school, and ancient acts of violent vengeance are shaping the trajectory of events in the town 200 years later.

Compulsively readable, this first social history of the opening up of the Canadian West is a triumph of historical detective work and gives us Siggins at the top of her game. While researching the biography of Louis Riel, Maggie Siggins became aware of a figure lurking in the background who had had a profound influence on the great Canadian reformer. This was his grand-mother Marie-Anne Lagimodière, née Gaboury. As Siggins’ research progressed, she came to regard Marie-Anne as the most exceptional Canadian woman of the nineteenth century. The perils of Laura Secord and Susanna Moodie paled in comparison, yet she remains largely unknown. Beautiful and rebellious, Marie-Anne was still unmarried at twenty-five—unheard of in 1800s Quebec habitant society. Furthermore, once she did marry Jean-Baptiste Lagimodière, she insisted on accompanying her fur trapper husband to the uncharted wilderness of western Canada. The year was 1807, and no European woman had yet ventured west of the Great Lakes region. For the next thirty years, she would live among the native people or at fur-trading forts from Pembina to Edmonton House, leading an undoubtedly difficult life but one with freedoms unknown to women in western societies of her time. Drawing from primary sources, Siggins paints a vivid portrait of life in the West, from survival on the plains and bison hunts to the tribal warfare triggered by the fur-trade economy. Through it all, Marie-Anne survived and thrived, living to ninety-six, the matriarch of a large and diverse family whose descendants still live in Manitoba.

Published to widespread critical acclaim, Riel: A Life of Revolution proved that an intimate and revealing portrait of one of our most enduring—and most isunderstood—legends could be an almost instant national bestseller. ‘Who is Louis Riel?’ Maggie Siggins asks, and comes up with some fascinating answers. Seen by many as an unrepentant traitor, a messianic prophet and a pathetic tyrant, Siggins uncovers the real Louis Riel—a complex man full of contradiction and angst, a charismatic visionary and poet, a humanitarian who gave up prestige and wealth to fight for the Métis people. Infused with atmosphere and detail, this fascinating portrait is illuminating in its accounts of the people and events that moulded the enigmatic rebel. Revealing a man passionate about forging an equitable and just relationship between native and white people, Riel: A Life of Revolution is more relevant today than ever before.

This is the story of a generation that went bad. Of six guys who lived for booze and dope, sex and rock. When they finally had their showdown with the Law, they decided to sink or swim together. They sank. What got Brian and the boys in trouble were two women who said the gang lured them back to their Toronto hangout, then repeatedly raped and abused them. It didn''t look good in court: two women who had never met each other had been able to quickly pick Brian and his buddies out of a group, and gave strikingly similar accounts of how they''d been terrorized. The prison sentences totalled eighty-seven years. Yet to this day the men maintain they are innocent. What makes men commit such brutal crimes against women? How should the justice system deal with them? These are the questions Maggie Siggins sought to answer by investigating the events of April 23 and May 15, 1979, and by exploring the backgrounds of the Lauder gang and the women they victimized. But as she delved into the incredible web of allegations, lies and inconsistencies that surrounded the stories of the rapes, the ideas of "aggressor" and "victim" became much less useful, blurred by a cloud of questions about what really happened on those two evenings.

When this book was first published in 1985, it became an instant bestseller and the basis for the popular CBC-TV series "Love and Hate." It''s easy to see why, when this true story reads like a crime thriller. Colin Thatcher was a golden boy, growing up the son of Saskatchewan''s Premier Ross Thatcher. But as he rose to political prominence and to a seat in the Saskatchewan cabinet, his marriage to JoAnn, the mother of his three children, began to unravel, amid rumours of infidelity and of domestic violence. His children disappeared; his estranged wife was shot at through her kitchen window, but Thatcher denied any knowledge of either incident and defied the law (and his old legislative buddies) again and again. The law wrung its hands, until JoAnn was finally bludgeoned to death in the family garage. At last, Thatcher had gone too far. In a dramatic trial in Saskatoon that involved every major legal figure in the province, he was found guilty of murder. At that point, Maggie Siggins''s 1985 book was published. But the story was too big to end there. In his Edmonton jail, Thatcher stayed in the news by publishing his memoirs and exciting the media with news of dramatic new evidence that would prove his innocence. It never appeared. He was eventually moved to a minimum-security jail in British Columbia, and seemed to be living a fairly good life. Nonetheless, though his three children grew up believing in his innocence, rumours continued to fly around the Regina underworld about him. In October 2000, Thatcher was the subject of a trial to see if he deserved early parole. Maggie Siggins was present, and this book gives a full account of the trial and of what has happened to all ofthe actors in this incredible case during the last 15 years. - Now updated, with coverage of Colin Thatcher''s recent parole hearing - Television series based on the book was a hit on both CBC and NBC - Maggie Siggins is an experienced and articulate journalist, who won a Governor General''s Award for her book "Revenge of the Land

July 14, 2003: Flin Flon lawyer Michael Bomek pleads guilty to six counts of sexual assault on young Cree men, some of whom come from the community of Pelican Narrows. His crime is emblematic of white culture'' s assault on this Rock Cree community. On the one hand, he was a dedicated lawyer who won 75 per cent of his cases for his native clients. On the other, he was an unthinkably corrupting influence. For over 200 years, Pelican Narrows has endured an equally torturous relationship with the encroaching European culture, from the Hudson Bay factors and missionaries of earlier times to the bureaucrats and police of today. By scrupulously researching the history of a community she has known for much of her life, by using oral history and documenting the personal stories of contemporary Pelican Narrows Cree, Siggins gives us the human face behind the newspaper headlines of native issues. Her storytelling powers are formidable and the portrait she gives us of this single Saskatchewan community is unforgettable.

Published to widespread critical acclaim, Riel: A Life of Revolution proved that an intimate and revealing portrait of one of our most enduring —and most misunderstood—legends could be an almost instant national bestseller. -Who is Louis Riel?’ Maggie Siggins asks, and comes up with some fascinating answers. Seen by many as an unrepentant traitor, a messianic prophet and a pathetic tyrant, Siggins uncovers the real Louis Riel—a complex man full of contradiction and angst, a charismatic visionary and poet, a humanitarian who gave up prestige and wealth to fight for the Métis people. Infused with atmosphere and detail, this fascinating portrait is illuminating in its accounts of the people and events that moulded the enigmatic rebel. Revealing a man passionate about forging an equitable and just relationship between native and white people, Riel: A Life of Revolution is more relevant today than ever before.

It all started with an R.H. King Collegiate class of ''61 reunion: 26 women meeting 30 years after their graduation. Siggins was struck by their wide range of fascinating life stories. These, after all, were the women who were born during the war, had come of age in the ''60s, and were changed by the women''s movement of the ''70s. They had all stood at the forefront of one of the greatest revolutions in history -- the emancipation of half the human race. Inspired by that reunion, Siggins set out to write the life stories of her classmates, using the emerging themes from these intense dramas as a gateway to explore women''s lives throughout history. The result is a compelling series of personal journeys linked by nothing less than an absorbing cultural history of women in the Western world, from antiquity to the present. A book that speaks powerfully to people of all ages -- and especially those of "the cusp generation" -- In Her Own Time is an inspiring, informative and wholly entertaining read.