Shortlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize • Finalist for the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Prize • A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year • One of CBC's Best Canadian Fiction of the Year • Winner of the Crime Writers of Canada Miller-Martin Award for Best Crime Novel

"Prairie Edge is both a propulsive crime narrative built around successive, compounding blunders and a work of literary art that tells us about what it means to live in a world where action and rhetoric around decolonization fail to align....Kerr extracts maximum amounts of comedy and pathos from the novel’s premise while populating this fictional world with resonant characters whose difficult experiences with group homes, social services, and activist circles are softened by enduring family bonds and friendships. Kerr entertains us with a contemporary caper while inviting readers to consider a future that has reckoned with the past.”
—Giller Prize 2024 jury citation

“A powerful…tale of friendship and hope in the face of intergenerational trauma.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Searing yet compassionate, sharp yet tender. Conor Kerr’s Prairie Edge is both a marvel of storytelling and a devastating critique of activists who care more about building their brands than taking care of their kin. Get swept up in this captivating story, then reckon with its startling implications.”
—Alicia Elliott, author of And Then She Fell

“Prairie Edge is a deeply introspective, philosophizing Indigenous Western that is filled with life, love, disaster, and freedom . . . . here we are rustled into trailer, reservation, university, foster care, and prison systems and the violence of imperialism is never once glossed over. Don’t be fooled, this novel also herds us into decolonial activism, sovereignty, and necessary criticisms all the while filled with ‘poets and dreamers’ and the roaring buckle of galloping Indigenous futurities. For fans of Michelle Good, Cody Caetano, and/or Jessica Johns—this book is for you!”
—Joshua Whitehead, author of Making Love with the Land

“This is a novel wise enough to know that the future we all want begins with our imaginations. A story both sharp and fresh, Prairie Edge dreams bison back into our everyday lives, our cities, and our future. Author Conor Kerr believes the prairie is calling the bison back, and in this novel he dares to braid threads of a storied past with the troubled present and a vision of a beautiful future.”
—Michelle Porter, author of A Grandmother Begins the Story