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Theresa Shea’s debut novel, The Unfinished Child, was published in 2013. It sold over 12,000 copies, was a popular book club selection, and was nominated for several awards. Her second, The Shade Tree, won the 2020 Guernica Prize for best novel manuscript and the  2022 Georges Bugnet Award  for Fiction (Alberta Literary Awards). Dog Days of Planet Earth, her much-anticipated third novel, will be published by ECW in fall 2026.

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“One of the most powerful Alberta writers of this decade   . . .” 
The St. Albert Gazette.

What reviewers and readers are saying about The Shade Tree:


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"In its account of almost half a century in the lives of two white Southern sisters and of the African Americans whose experiences are inextricable from theirs, The Shade Tree is brutally personal, heartbreakingly political – and remarkably written. Theresa Shea has combined boldness and subtlety with swaths of compassion to come up with a novel that's both complicated and ferociously clear."
Joan BarfootAuthor, Giller and Booker Prizes Nominee, and Author of Abra, Luck, and, Critical Injuries
"In its account of almost half a century in the lives of two white Southern sisters and of the African Americans whose experiences are inextricable from theirs, The Shade Tree is brutally personal, heartbreakingly political – and remarkably written. Theresa Shea has combined boldness and subtlety with swaths of compassion to come up with a novel that's both complicated and ferociously clear."
Terry GambleAuthor of "The Water Dancers", "Good Family", and "The Euologist".
"Theresa Shea’s The Shade Tree reminds me thematically of Lee’s novel. It, too, is set in the south of the States in a similar, though far more expansive, time period; it follows the lives of two young white girls – sisters – coming of age and exploring their positions in the world as white, as women, and as white women. Where the novel differs from Lee’s, though, is that it gives Sliver Lanier, a Black midwife, a voice of her own."us leo.
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