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Book Cover for: Mad Honey, Katie Welch

Mad Honey

Katie Welch

Melissa Makepeace poured herself into running the family farm when her boyfriend, and head beekeeper, vanished on an early spring day, silently absorbing yet another man disappearing from her life. But three months later Beck Wise reappears - thin, pale, with no idea what day it is and filled with strange memories of bees - and Melissa finds herself unravelling multiple mysteries. What had happened to Beck? Where did her father go? How can she keep the farm together? With gorgeous descriptions, deft characterizations and a page-turning plot, Mad Honey immerses the reader in a search for truth bounded by the everyday magic of beekeeping, of family and of finding peace, all while asking how much we really understand the natural world.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Buckrider Books
  • Publish Date: May 10th, 2022
  • Pages: 264
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.90in - 5.91in - 0.79in - 0.95lb
  • EAN: 9781989496527
  • Categories: LiteraryFamily Life - GeneralNature & the Environment

About the Author

Welch, Katie: -

Katie Welch writes fiction and teaches music in Kamloops, BC, on the traditional, unceded territory of the Secwepemc people. Her short stories have been published in EVENT Magazine, Prairie Fire, The Antigonish Review, The Temz Review, The Quarantine Review and elsewhere. An alumnus of the Banff Centre's Emerging Writers Intensive, she was first runner-up in UBCO's 2019 Short Story Contest, and her story "Poisoned Apple" was chosen as Pick-of-the-Week by Longform Fiction.

Katie holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Toronto (1990). Her daughters, Olivia and Heather Saya, share her passion for nature and outdoor recreation. Katie loves to cycle, hike and cross-country ski with her husband, Will Stinson, and they are creating a remote home on Cortes Island, in Desolation Sound.

Praise for this book

"It had me buzzing and gliding along the golden threads of honeyed magic, simply delighting in the rich and juicy descriptions and then it whipped into a fabulous mystery!"

- Lisa de Nikolits - Minerva Reader

"Welch does for beekeeping what W.P. Kinsella did for baseball or Ernest Hemingway did for fishing. Through her deftly-controlled description, we see bee colonies, and the humans that tend to them, from a perspective that is engaging and eye-opening. We are invited to peel back the layers of Welch's characters and their almost idyllic, agrarian lives to see the pain and angst beneath."

- The Quarantine Review

"There is a buzzing hum to Mad Honey, the drone of secrets linking characters together in ways that are both sticky and sweet. From rustic cabins in the Canadian wilderness to Cuban gardens bursting in bloom, from country fairs to dive bars, the reader is taken on a wild ride. Part Canadian farmhouse gothic, part family mystery, Welch's is a propulsive debut."

- Laisha Rosnau

"Katie Welch reminds us that we are a very small part of a massive and complex non-human world and that, where we heed the lessons of non-centrality, we can also truly love. Mad Honey is a beautiful novel."

- Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of Perfecting and All the Broken Things