Village of the Small Houses

Ian Ferguson won the 2004 Leacock Medal for Humour for this outrageously funny book about growing up destitute in the far north. In 1959, just one step ahead of the law, Ferguson's con-artist father fled Edmonton with his pregnant wife, Louise, in a beat-up Mercury Zephyr. Passing himself off at the ?Indian school? as a teacher, Hank settles his ever-growing family in remote Fort Vermilion, Canada's third-poorest community ? where plumbing and electricity are unheard of and luck seems reserved for Whites only. Ferguson's gifts as a comic actor come to the fore in this spirited reading of his rib-tickling yet tender chronicle of a hard-knocks childhood. Mixing truth with fiction and introducing a cast of loveable misfits, Village of the Small Houses exists somewhere between Angela's Ashes and Who Has Seen the Wind.