WELCOME
Theresa Shea’s widely-celebrated 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. The Shade Tree, winner of the 2020 Guernica Prize for best novel manuscript and the 2022 Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction (Alberta Literary Awards), is her much-anticipated follow-up.
“One of the most powerful Alberta writers of this decade . . .”
The St. Albert Gazette.


“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 Barfoot
“In her nuanced portrait of families riven by race and sex, Theresa Shea offers a searing indictment of Jim Crow’s corrosive influence that, if unleashed and unquestioned, can make monsters of us all. Beautifully and unflinchingly written, this is a novel for our times.”
What they are saying about The Shade Tree:
NEWS
EVENTS
There is no Event

“Every once in a while a book comes along that impacts me on an extraordinary level, and I want to encourage everyone I know to read it, and I want to talk about it, because it makes me think and feel so deeply. The Unfinished Child is one such book.”
The 49th Parallel