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Sarah Louise Butler published her debut novel, The Wild Heavens (D&M, 2020) about how a little girl and her grandfather discover an impossibly large set of footprints and become obsessed with the nine-foot tall creature that made them. Publicity says the story, "pays tribute to the magic and unfathomable mystery of the natural world."
Butler's second novel, Rufous and Calliope (D&M, 2025) features runaway children, a treehouse hideaway, early-onset dementia, and the persistence of hope and family connections amid ecological grief.
French publisher Phébus bought the World French-language rights to The Wild Heavens as well as for Butler's second novel Rufous and Calliope.
During Butler's literary tour of France in the Spring of 2025 for The Wild Heavens, French reviewer Librairie des livres et nous called the novel "An extraordinary text that will appeal equally to lovers of nature, adventure novels, and intimate stories."
Butler has published short fiction in Room magazine, has a degree in earth sciences, and has volunteered in wildlife research. She lives in Nelson.
BOOKS
The Wild Heavens (D&M 2020) $22.95 9781771622585
Rufous and Calliope (D&M, 2025) $24.95 9781771624572
[BCBW 2025]
++++
The Wild Heavens by Sarah Louise Butler (D&M $22.95)
Review by Cherie Thiessen, BCBW 2020
Widower Aidan Fitzpatrick first saw ‘Charlie’ in 1920. That’s when he fell under the 9-foot-tall primate’s spell. The sighting of that unidentifiable creature in the woods changed the course of his life.
Fitzpatrick abandoned his goal of becoming a Catholic priest in favour of studying biology and ultimately becoming a veterinarian. He saved his money for years in order to buy property in B.C.’s interior, where that first sighting occurred.
The loner carved a cedar version of Charlie, placing it inside the doorway, anticipating a reunion with its flesh ‘n’ blood counterpart. The carving becomes part of the household and features largely in the lives of the occupants.
“It was a deliberate decision not to call the somewhat mysterious creature in this novel a Sasquatch or a Bigfoot,” says Sarah Louise Butler, author of The Wild Heavens, “or any other commonly used term. The use of the name ‘Charlie’ is a way around constantly having to describe it as an ‘unidentified endemic non-human primate’.”
All of us, at one time or another, have felt incomplete and disconnected. As we are introduced to other characters in Butler’s debut novel, it becomes apparent that ‘Charlie’ is a symbol of our universal yearning for finding someone or something to make us feel whole.
The lone woodsman in the wild heavens once had a wife who died, as well as a daughter, Lily, who left their rustic home largely in response to her fractious relationship with him.
Since then, Lily has died in an accident and Fitzpatrick has been raising his only grandchild, Sandy, who was seven years old when he brought her to live with him in 1959.
The main character turns out to be the woodsman’s granddaughter, Sandy, who never knew her own father due to a short-lived marriage.
While being raised in a remote cabin that included the cedar statue of Charlie, Sandy made do with her distracted, scholarly grandfather and befriended a boy named Luke. The outdoors was their playground and their classroom: they swam, they fished, they explored, and they learned from the creatures around them.
Luke was hiding out with his mother, Eva, having escaped from a violent father/husband. Eventually Sandy married this childhood sweetheart but tragedy again intervened. Her young husband went missing from the cabin, presumably drowned, when she was pregnant with their second child.
Other than a short preface by Sandy which introduces the grandfather and the Charlie quest, the story unfolds all within one winter’s day, interspersed with memories from Sandy’s life in British Columbia’s rugged interior mountains.
Everyone is a tiny creature in a wide, wide landscape, much like the planet earth in the galaxy. Sarah Louise Butler, who is a wildlife research enthusiast and holds a degree in Earth Sciences, has done a stellar job of creating a sense of place that looms high, mysterious and vast over the humans.
“I’ve always found questions more interesting than answers,” says Butler, “and for a novel where both science and religion feature prominently, it felt appropriate that my characters couldn’t possibly have all the answers.
“I recognize that not all readers will share this view, which is why I tried to make it very clear, from the first pages of the novel, which sort of book this is.”
In a word, The Wild Heavens is enigmatic. Life is bewildering. We have a small cast of people who have been left alone: Aidan Fitzpatrick lost his wife, then his daughter. Sandy never really had a father, then she lost her mother and then she lost Luke, who had lost his father. Eventually, Sandy will also have to part ways with her grandfather.
By 2003, Luke has been gone 30 years and Sandy’s children have departed to live their own lives. Sandy has just awoken after dreaming of him. Downstairs, she discovers a sparrow trapped in the house. She opens the door to release it and discovers gigantic footprints, footprints she has not seen for 30 years, since the night her husband disappeared.
“This book is hard to categorize,” Butler says. “And maybe it’s most easily defined by what it is not. It’s not a thriller, and it’s not a Bigfoot story, and it’s not a tale of a family living in perfect harmony with nature.
“It’s the story of a few inquisitive, flawed, hopeful people who are deeply in love with the place they live, even when its complexities and mysteries exceed the range of their understanding.
“The non-human elements receive more attention than is, perhaps, typical, but the small cast of human characters and their interactions with each other, as well as with the natural world, are at the forefront of the narrative.”
The Wild Heavens is not magic realism. It’s closer to science realism. But it explores the mystery of life. It’s one of those stories that’s bigger than the sum of its parts.
“There’s just something so compelling about their life cycle,” Luke says to Sandy, watching Kokanee spawning in the river. “The circularity of it; how they spawn and then immediately die. It’s kind of perfect in a way.”
When the enigmatic tracks of Charlie finally reappear, it is Sandy who sets out on the trail alone, determined to find out the truth about the mystery that has shaped her life. 9781771622585
Cherie Thiessen reviews fiction from Pender Island.
***
Rufous and Calliope
by Sarah Louise Butler
(D&M $24.95)
Review by Susan Sanford Blades (BCBW 2025)
All family histories are made up, to a certain extent. Siblings will remember the same pivotal event in different ways—was it you or your older brother who tied Dad’s shoelaces together under the table at your grandparents’ anniversary party? And memory, we are told, is unreliable. Every time we return to one, it becomes increasingly warped, like an overplayed cassette tape. Sarah Louise Butler explores exactly this territory in her sophomore novel, Rufous and Calliope.
The novel flips between three time periods—the summer when Rufous was five years old which he spent on the lam living in a treehouse with his twin sister, Calliope, and his older siblings: Silv, Fletch and Fawn; his post-treehouse childhood which was spent apart from his siblings in the fictional small town of Fleetwood Siding; and the present tense in which Rufous is traversing the Caribou Pass Trail on foot in order to arrive on time at the treehouse for a planned reunion with his siblings, whom he hasn’t seen since that fateful treehouse summer.
In a series of short chunks, the book is written in a style that mimics Rufous’ patchy and faltering memory. We receive little bits of information from various times in his past and present, stitched into a version of his story, offering more or different details on each pass. We learn that Rufous and his siblings ran from something at home and ended up spending that summer in a treehouse in the Kootenays hiding from social workers, or any adults, whom they were certain would split them up. They survived off of thimbleberries, huckleberries, Saskatoon berries and fish from the river. They planned to leave in the fall, once the campground nearby thinned out and they became more conspicuous. Almost starving despite their best efforts, they decided to stay until after “the caloric windfall of Halloween.” We know something terrible happened after Halloween and that Rufous spent the rest of his childhood away from his siblings in a stone house in Fleetwood Siding being raised by a kind middle-aged couple, Aoife and Seannagh. We know his memory is becoming increasingly unreliable.
Butler uses Rufous’ condition, “a progressive neurodegenerative illness, one that will ultimately prove fatal,” to ruminate on memory and story, as well as to build tension. Through Rufous’ sparse recollections, she feeds us little pieces of what happened in the treehouse, how the siblings were separated, how Rufous ended up in the stone house, bit by bit. Family tall tales also play a role. We hear the older siblings’ yarns about how Rufous and Calliope ended up in their family, of how Rufous lost a pinky finger—“Calliope had bitten off the little finger on my right hand before we were even born, and she’d been a biter ever since.” We realize the importance of memory in building our own stories, our sense of self: “if I don’t remember, does it even count?” But we also become aware of the fallibility of memory—anyone’s memory. Rufous tells us, “I was five years old—all of this is a translation. I can’t go back there to feel everything exactly as it was. I can only filter it through the person I am now.”
Interestingly, Rufous, who as an adult is both a wildlife technician and cartographer, seems to remember everything having to do with the flora and fauna of the Kootenays. His story is very much grounded in the natural world. It’s how Rufous understands time passing; for instance, he’d know winter was coming “when finally all the branches of all the apple trees in the orchard were empty, the last of the wormy grounders fermenting in crow-torn heaps on the ground.” And Butler uses Rufous’ memory loss to contemplate how it mirrors the way most humans forget their place in nature. As he treks, as an adult, back to the treehouse, he is surrounded by smoke from forest fires, ashes falling from the sky. “Maybe this is what we have,” he thinks, “an acquired neurological condition in which we have lost our ability to recognize who we are related to. We look into the eyes of the owl, the bear, the bat, and we deny. We deny. And again, a third time. / I do not know you. And the world burns.”
In Rufous and Calliope, Sarah Louise Butler has thoughtfully composed a love letter to the flora and fauna of the Kootenays, and to the bonds of family, both genetic and found. It covers some tragic territory but leaves us filled with hope, both for humanity and for the earth that holds us. 9781771624572
Victoria-based Susan Sanford Blades published her debut novel, Fake It So Real (Nightwood), in 2020.
Butler's second novel, Rufous and Calliope (D&M, 2025) features runaway children, a treehouse hideaway, early-onset dementia, and the persistence of hope and family connections amid ecological grief.
French publisher Phébus bought the World French-language rights to The Wild Heavens as well as for Butler's second novel Rufous and Calliope.
During Butler's literary tour of France in the Spring of 2025 for The Wild Heavens, French reviewer Librairie des livres et nous called the novel "An extraordinary text that will appeal equally to lovers of nature, adventure novels, and intimate stories."
Butler has published short fiction in Room magazine, has a degree in earth sciences, and has volunteered in wildlife research. She lives in Nelson.
BOOKS
The Wild Heavens (D&M 2020) $22.95 9781771622585
Rufous and Calliope (D&M, 2025) $24.95 9781771624572
[BCBW 2025]
++++
The Wild Heavens by Sarah Louise Butler (D&M $22.95)
Review by Cherie Thiessen, BCBW 2020
Widower Aidan Fitzpatrick first saw ‘Charlie’ in 1920. That’s when he fell under the 9-foot-tall primate’s spell. The sighting of that unidentifiable creature in the woods changed the course of his life.
Fitzpatrick abandoned his goal of becoming a Catholic priest in favour of studying biology and ultimately becoming a veterinarian. He saved his money for years in order to buy property in B.C.’s interior, where that first sighting occurred.
The loner carved a cedar version of Charlie, placing it inside the doorway, anticipating a reunion with its flesh ‘n’ blood counterpart. The carving becomes part of the household and features largely in the lives of the occupants.
“It was a deliberate decision not to call the somewhat mysterious creature in this novel a Sasquatch or a Bigfoot,” says Sarah Louise Butler, author of The Wild Heavens, “or any other commonly used term. The use of the name ‘Charlie’ is a way around constantly having to describe it as an ‘unidentified endemic non-human primate’.”
All of us, at one time or another, have felt incomplete and disconnected. As we are introduced to other characters in Butler’s debut novel, it becomes apparent that ‘Charlie’ is a symbol of our universal yearning for finding someone or something to make us feel whole.
The lone woodsman in the wild heavens once had a wife who died, as well as a daughter, Lily, who left their rustic home largely in response to her fractious relationship with him.
Since then, Lily has died in an accident and Fitzpatrick has been raising his only grandchild, Sandy, who was seven years old when he brought her to live with him in 1959.
The main character turns out to be the woodsman’s granddaughter, Sandy, who never knew her own father due to a short-lived marriage.
While being raised in a remote cabin that included the cedar statue of Charlie, Sandy made do with her distracted, scholarly grandfather and befriended a boy named Luke. The outdoors was their playground and their classroom: they swam, they fished, they explored, and they learned from the creatures around them.
Luke was hiding out with his mother, Eva, having escaped from a violent father/husband. Eventually Sandy married this childhood sweetheart but tragedy again intervened. Her young husband went missing from the cabin, presumably drowned, when she was pregnant with their second child.
Other than a short preface by Sandy which introduces the grandfather and the Charlie quest, the story unfolds all within one winter’s day, interspersed with memories from Sandy’s life in British Columbia’s rugged interior mountains.
Everyone is a tiny creature in a wide, wide landscape, much like the planet earth in the galaxy. Sarah Louise Butler, who is a wildlife research enthusiast and holds a degree in Earth Sciences, has done a stellar job of creating a sense of place that looms high, mysterious and vast over the humans.
“I’ve always found questions more interesting than answers,” says Butler, “and for a novel where both science and religion feature prominently, it felt appropriate that my characters couldn’t possibly have all the answers.
“I recognize that not all readers will share this view, which is why I tried to make it very clear, from the first pages of the novel, which sort of book this is.”
In a word, The Wild Heavens is enigmatic. Life is bewildering. We have a small cast of people who have been left alone: Aidan Fitzpatrick lost his wife, then his daughter. Sandy never really had a father, then she lost her mother and then she lost Luke, who had lost his father. Eventually, Sandy will also have to part ways with her grandfather.
By 2003, Luke has been gone 30 years and Sandy’s children have departed to live their own lives. Sandy has just awoken after dreaming of him. Downstairs, she discovers a sparrow trapped in the house. She opens the door to release it and discovers gigantic footprints, footprints she has not seen for 30 years, since the night her husband disappeared.
“This book is hard to categorize,” Butler says. “And maybe it’s most easily defined by what it is not. It’s not a thriller, and it’s not a Bigfoot story, and it’s not a tale of a family living in perfect harmony with nature.
“It’s the story of a few inquisitive, flawed, hopeful people who are deeply in love with the place they live, even when its complexities and mysteries exceed the range of their understanding.
“The non-human elements receive more attention than is, perhaps, typical, but the small cast of human characters and their interactions with each other, as well as with the natural world, are at the forefront of the narrative.”
The Wild Heavens is not magic realism. It’s closer to science realism. But it explores the mystery of life. It’s one of those stories that’s bigger than the sum of its parts.
“There’s just something so compelling about their life cycle,” Luke says to Sandy, watching Kokanee spawning in the river. “The circularity of it; how they spawn and then immediately die. It’s kind of perfect in a way.”
When the enigmatic tracks of Charlie finally reappear, it is Sandy who sets out on the trail alone, determined to find out the truth about the mystery that has shaped her life. 9781771622585
Cherie Thiessen reviews fiction from Pender Island.
***
Rufous and Calliope
by Sarah Louise Butler
(D&M $24.95)
Review by Susan Sanford Blades (BCBW 2025)
All family histories are made up, to a certain extent. Siblings will remember the same pivotal event in different ways—was it you or your older brother who tied Dad’s shoelaces together under the table at your grandparents’ anniversary party? And memory, we are told, is unreliable. Every time we return to one, it becomes increasingly warped, like an overplayed cassette tape. Sarah Louise Butler explores exactly this territory in her sophomore novel, Rufous and Calliope.
The novel flips between three time periods—the summer when Rufous was five years old which he spent on the lam living in a treehouse with his twin sister, Calliope, and his older siblings: Silv, Fletch and Fawn; his post-treehouse childhood which was spent apart from his siblings in the fictional small town of Fleetwood Siding; and the present tense in which Rufous is traversing the Caribou Pass Trail on foot in order to arrive on time at the treehouse for a planned reunion with his siblings, whom he hasn’t seen since that fateful treehouse summer.
In a series of short chunks, the book is written in a style that mimics Rufous’ patchy and faltering memory. We receive little bits of information from various times in his past and present, stitched into a version of his story, offering more or different details on each pass. We learn that Rufous and his siblings ran from something at home and ended up spending that summer in a treehouse in the Kootenays hiding from social workers, or any adults, whom they were certain would split them up. They survived off of thimbleberries, huckleberries, Saskatoon berries and fish from the river. They planned to leave in the fall, once the campground nearby thinned out and they became more conspicuous. Almost starving despite their best efforts, they decided to stay until after “the caloric windfall of Halloween.” We know something terrible happened after Halloween and that Rufous spent the rest of his childhood away from his siblings in a stone house in Fleetwood Siding being raised by a kind middle-aged couple, Aoife and Seannagh. We know his memory is becoming increasingly unreliable.
Butler uses Rufous’ condition, “a progressive neurodegenerative illness, one that will ultimately prove fatal,” to ruminate on memory and story, as well as to build tension. Through Rufous’ sparse recollections, she feeds us little pieces of what happened in the treehouse, how the siblings were separated, how Rufous ended up in the stone house, bit by bit. Family tall tales also play a role. We hear the older siblings’ yarns about how Rufous and Calliope ended up in their family, of how Rufous lost a pinky finger—“Calliope had bitten off the little finger on my right hand before we were even born, and she’d been a biter ever since.” We realize the importance of memory in building our own stories, our sense of self: “if I don’t remember, does it even count?” But we also become aware of the fallibility of memory—anyone’s memory. Rufous tells us, “I was five years old—all of this is a translation. I can’t go back there to feel everything exactly as it was. I can only filter it through the person I am now.”
Interestingly, Rufous, who as an adult is both a wildlife technician and cartographer, seems to remember everything having to do with the flora and fauna of the Kootenays. His story is very much grounded in the natural world. It’s how Rufous understands time passing; for instance, he’d know winter was coming “when finally all the branches of all the apple trees in the orchard were empty, the last of the wormy grounders fermenting in crow-torn heaps on the ground.” And Butler uses Rufous’ memory loss to contemplate how it mirrors the way most humans forget their place in nature. As he treks, as an adult, back to the treehouse, he is surrounded by smoke from forest fires, ashes falling from the sky. “Maybe this is what we have,” he thinks, “an acquired neurological condition in which we have lost our ability to recognize who we are related to. We look into the eyes of the owl, the bear, the bat, and we deny. We deny. And again, a third time. / I do not know you. And the world burns.”
In Rufous and Calliope, Sarah Louise Butler has thoughtfully composed a love letter to the flora and fauna of the Kootenays, and to the bonds of family, both genetic and found. It covers some tragic territory but leaves us filled with hope, both for humanity and for the earth that holds us. 9781771624572
Victoria-based Susan Sanford Blades published her debut novel, Fake It So Real (Nightwood), in 2020.
