About the book
- Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher Finalist
About the author
Alison Preston was born and raised in Winnipeg. After trying on a number of other Canadian cities, she returned to her hometown, where she currently resides. All of her books are set in the Norwood Flats area of Winnipeg, including The Rain Barrel Baby, The Geranium Girls, Cherry Bites, Sunny Dreams, and The Girl in the Wall.
A graduate of the University of Winnipeg, and a letter carrier for twenty-eight years, Alison won the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction for The Girl in the Wall and has been twice nominated for the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer, following the publications of The Rain Barrel Baby (Signature Editions) and her first novel, A Blue and Golden Year (Turnstone Press). She was also shortlisted for the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award for Cherry Bites and the Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher for Sunny Dreams.
Visit Alison’s website at: http://www.alisonpreston.com
Excerpt
from Prologue
We went next door to Picardy's. The restaurant was crowded but we found a table in a corner behind a large potted fern. Mother settled Sunny. She didn't need much settling; she was sound asleep.
"You stay here with the baby, Violet, and I'll go up to the counter to choose our treats."
I was having none of that. I wanted to pick my own. She sighed and gave in to me. My mother wasn't much of a fighter.
There was chocolate cake and rhubarb pie and banana cream pudding and apricot tarts. I finally chose the chocolate cake. Mother added it to her bowl of pudding already on the tray. Sunny was too young for treats. Her needs were pretty basic, mostly involving milk.
I followed along behind my mother as she carried our tray back to the table. When it clattered to the ground every face in the room turned toward us. Moon-faced women and chisel-faced men and rosy-cheeked waitresses and busboys wearing hairnets. My mother scrabbled through the carriage and raced about the restaurant from table to table.
"Sunny!" she cried out. "My baby!"
The carriage looked the way it always did when Sunny wasn't in it. There was a soft dent in the pillow where her head had been. I touched it. It was warm.
My mum clutched at her throat where there was nothing but the flimsy collar of her summer dress.
"Help!" She didn't make a sound but we all saw the word leave her mouth.
A man in a dark suit took charge. He phoned the police from the restaurant phone on the wall next to the cash register. That frightened my mother even more. Surely it was too soon for those kinds of measures, she said. He tried to calm her and told everyone not to touch anything. Everything he said seemed to crank up my mum's terror a notch. I wondered if I should admit to having touched Sunny's pillow but I decided to keep it to myself.
"Maybe Will's got her," my mother said in an odd loud voice. "Maybe my husband slipped in and picked her up."
A waitress ran next door for my dad. We were well known at the restaurant: that nice lawyer's family.
My mother ran out to the street; the man who kept scaring her ran out too and women fussed over me. I stayed with the carriage, guarding it like I should have been doing all along. I placed my hands in the pockets of my dress to keep from touching anything and stared at my cake on the floor.
I don't think I considered that I would never see Sunny again or that my life would change drastically from that moment in time.
Reviews
“Sunny Dreams comes across as understated and matter-of-fact. In fact, for a novel that starts with the broad-daylight kidnapping of a baby and suicide of the baby's mother, and ends with the murder of a black migrant worker in Depression-era…” >>
— Michael Mirolla Event
“Alison Preston's forte is the homely drama, and Sunny Dreams is perfect. Set mostly in the darkest days of the Depression, it takes on a parent's worst nightmare: the stolen baby... Preston is a dab hand with setting, and her…” >>
— The Globe & Mail
“The mystery of Sunny's abduction never feels forced or separated from anything else in the novel. It is the backbone. Violet's journey into adulthood evolves in between the plot, weaving in beautifully.” >>
— The Uniter
“A Sunny Life
Preston's "one thing leads to another" style is flawless
All four of Alison Preston's previous mysteries have been set in her hometown of Winnipeg. Her latest, Sunny Dreams, continues the tradition, with a…” >>
— Shirley Byers Prairie books Now