Meet Mary Lawson, small-town northern Ontario girl, and author of the buzz-making book, A Town Called Solace. Lawson, who was 55 years of age when her debut novel, Crow Lake, was published, is a distant relative of the beloved Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables. CBC Radio listeners chose Crow Lake as one of the top 40 essential Canadian novels of the decade. However, along the way she penned a short story, which was set in a mythical northern Ontario town in the 1940s, a time frame consistent with the author’s childhood. “I loved writing that first story, Crow Lake, because it allowed me to go back home in my mind.
