Roofwalker
When Susan Power burst onto the literary scene with her first book, The Grass Dancer, critics called it “the real thing” (Los Angeles Times) and “extravagantly inventive” (Washington Post). Power’s novel of Native American life went on to win the PEN/Hemingway Award and become a national bestseller. In Roofwalker, Power returns with equally magical prose to tell the stories of both imaginary and real figures who live mostly away from the reservation yet palpably feel its influence and see its ghosts in their daily lives.
Roofwalker evokes a world in which spirits and the living commingle and Sioux culture and modern life collide with disarming power, humor, and joy. The characters grapple with potent forces of family, history, and belief—forces that at times dare them to do more to feed their identity, and at times simply paralyze them. Rich with women who do things, this book gives voice to characters who make space for contradictions in their lives with varying success and, by extension, live the “Indian way” to varying degrees.
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Susan Power
Susan Power is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and a native Chicagoan. She is the author of Roofwalker, The Grass Dancer, and Sacred Wilderness. She received an A.B. from Harvard/Radcliffe, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her short fiction has been published in Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, Voice Literary Supplement, Ploughshares, Story, and The Best American Short Stories 1993.
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