![]() ![]() Christian evangelists in 1956 to convert an uncontacted tribe called the Waorani. It is based on real events: The notoriously ill-advised Ecuadorian mission of a group of U.S. But her writing is so luminous, her characters’ insights so frequently profound that one has the impression one is reading about intellectuals or poets.įive Wives takes some frankly unattractive people as its subject, and presents them as purely well meaning. This would be a highly inaccurate perception: Thomas’s fictitious worlds do often revolve around the past – her first novel was set in the 1930s, her second in the 19th century and Five Wives in the 1950s – and she has a fascination with unsophisticated people, with people of dour religious backgrounds or isolation. ![]() It’s perhaps because she has no Twitter profile and lives in Winnipeg, but I suspect it’s also because, to the uninitiated, she might seem like an old-fashioned Canlit writer: A white lady of a certain age who writes from the Prairies about the past. ![]() She is the author of four novels, winner of various awards – Commonwealth, Amazon First novel, Engel/Findlay – and the darling of reviewers, but she still doesn’t tend to make the breathless “must read” lists. Joan Thomas is one of those brilliant, eloquent, curious, far-seeing Canadian writers who for some reason consistently flies under the media radar. ![]()
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