Description
After practicing medicine for forty-five years, Doctor "Sawbones" Hunter is retiring. It's April 1948, and the long-awaited hospital in Upward, Saskatchewan is about to open. Although the war is over and the town is buoyed by optimism, a change is in the air. Revealed through dialogue and memory, Sawbones Memorial is the story of one man as told by his town.
Reviews
"If you've never read Sinclair Ross, the Saskatchewan-born writer who helped define prairie realism, give thanks to the University of Alberta Press for this exquisitely produced quality paperback reissue. And if you have, now is the time to reacquaint yourself with one of the most distinct voices in Western Canadian literature....With Sawbones Memorial, he perfectly captures the rhythms and realities of small-town life in the West....(T)he book explores both the generosity and the hateful bigotry found in small towns everywhere. There is tenderness here, and bitterness, too....Also reprinted by the U of A Press are two other Ross novels, Whir of Gold and The Well. Both are dazzling. Marc Horton, The Edmonton Journal
"Given this continuing critical engagement with Ross's writing, we can be grateful to the University of Alberta Press for reissuing the three novels of Sinclair Ross no longer in print: The Well, Whir of Gold, and Sawbones Memorial....Hardy provides something like a close reading of the novel in his introduction, describing with unusual sensitivity the significant turns in the plot. He also suggests some of the ways in which the novel may be re-examined by a new generation in terms of cultural rifts between rural and urban....Mitchell takes this opportunity to show the various ways Ross critiques the bigotry, hypocrisy and mean-spiritedness of a small town, laying bare the faults of Upward but its warmth and attractions as well....I do wish Sinclair Ross could see these reissues, surely the most attractive presentation his work has ever received." David Stouck