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LADDER TO HEAVEN

*** new release ***

   coming in fall 2025 from Wolsak and Wynn

An earthquake strikes the Pacific coast of North America. Del Samara, living inland with her husband and three children, should have been safe. Instead the emergency exposes Del’s addiction and sets off a chain of misfortunes. Homeless and injured, Del abandons her family and retreats to her father’s fishing camp with her dog, Manx. 

Three years later, Manx dies, and Del emerges from isolation. She hopes to find her children and atone for her transgressions but the post-earthquake world is baffling and broken; animals talk telepathically, and motorized travel has all but disappeared. As Del pieces together the present, puzzling hints surface about her past, and to reassemble her life she needs to go back to her beginnings on Vancouver Island. 

Set against the startling backdrop of a ruptured earth, Ladder to Heaven takes the reader on a perilous overland and maritime journey toward redemption. Along the way Del meets Cheng, a sailor who understands loss. Resilient and generous, Cheng makes a reunion with her family possible, but what Del finds is not what she expected. 

 

Click to pre-order Mad Honey today.
Mad Honey cover by Michel Vrana

When Beck Wise vanished, his girlfriend Melissa Makepeace poured herself into caring for the family farm, silently absorbing yet another man disappearing from her life. But when Beck reappears three months later, thin, pale, with no idea what day it is and filled with memories of being bees, a series of layered mysteries begins to unravel. What had happened to Beck? Where did her father go? How can she keep the farm together? With gorgeous descriptions, deft characterizations and a page-turning plot, Mad Honey immerses the reader in a search for truth bounded by the everyday magic of beekeeping, of family and of finding peace, all while asking how much we really understand the natural world.

“It had me buzzing and gliding along the golden threads of honeyed magic, simply delighting in the rich and juicy descriptions and then it whipped into a fabulous mystery!”

— Lisa de Nikolits, Minerva Reader

“Welch does for beekeeping what W.P. Kinsella did for baseball or Ernest Hemingway did for fishing. Through her deftly-controlled description, we see bee colonies, and the humans that tend to them, from a perspective that is engaging and eye-opening. We are invited to peel back the layers of Welch’s characters and their almost idyllic, agrarian lives to see the pain and angst beneath.”

– The Quarantine Review

 
“There is a buzzing hum to Mad Honey, the drone of secrets linking characters together in ways that are both sticky and sweet. From rustic cabins in the Canadian wilderness to Cuban gardens bursting in bloom, from country fairs to dive bars, the reader is taken on a wild ride. Part Canadian farmhouse gothic, part family mystery, Welch’s is a propulsive debut.”
 
— Laisha Rosnau
 
 
“Katie Welch reminds us that we are a very small part of a massive and complex non-human world and that, where we heed the lessons of non-centrality, we can also truly love. Mad Honey is a beautiful novel.”

— Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of Perfecting and All the Broken Things

    * Nominated for the 2023 OLA Evergreen Award *

300 PAGES | ISBN 978-1-989496-52-7

Published under Wolsak & Wynn’s Buckrider Books imprint. 

Order Mad Honey