Greenbank: In the Country of the Past

Winner: Canadian Historical Association - Best Regional History, 1988

Using the lives of four families as its focus, Greenbank broadens to explore and capture with extraordinary vividness life as a whole in early

Canada. The remarkable will of the early pioneers, and the dissipation of that will in succeeding generations; the creation of an educational system from scratch; the hardships of everyday life, and the simple recreations that helped to dispel them; the coming of the railways; the subcurrent of alcohol’s influence on the culture, and the fight against it; the harsh ethic of evangelism, which gave shape to so many of the attitudes of the people - all these are recurrent themes in Greenbank. Within this broad canvas the lives of individual people are the brush strokes that bring life as a whole into vivid and poignant focus.

First published in

Canada in 1988 to extraordinary acclaim, Greenbank is now available throughout the world in an accessible paperback format.