Pilgrimage opens in the deep winter of 1891 on the Métis and missionary settlement of Lac St. Anne, Canada. A young woman of mixed-blood named Mahkesîs is carrying the child of the married Englishman who manages the Hudson Bay Company trading post. She is forced to reveal her devastating secret to her Cree grandmother. As an unmarried Catholic girl, Mahkesîs waits for a miracle in the very place others come for redemption.
Set in a northern landscape, Pilgrimage is a brilliant debut novel about love and loss and women and men trying to survive the violent intimacy of a small place in a changing colonial empire.
