With the Czarist empire in turmoil, a young Mennonite couple in what is now Ukraine adopts a Russian baby. Over the next years their lives twist, alter, and face very unexpected challenges. Amalia and Isaak Albrecht’s new family is not at all what they had dreamed of; nevertheless, it is a treasure essential for them to nourish and protect in the violent and unstable era of the Russian Revolution. In plain, direct language, Sarah Klassen offers a story of hardship, uncertain loyalty, and strange moments of gratitude. At the novel’s centre is the surprising and defiant Sofia, the adopted Russian daughter, so unlike everyone around her, yet still needing love. This quiet, delicately written novel explores themes of belonging, responsibility, and the places we call home.

In poems that contemplate human experience, Sarah Klassen charts the paths we travel in search of the Tree of Life. This quest for the nexus of spiritual fulfillment takes readers from the steps of ruined cities to perilous migrations, school playgrounds, and into dream. It rallies against injustice, and finds pause in nature and sacred rituals. With firm, guiding hands, Klassen leads the way across the tumult of existence in pursuit of an elusive Eden.

Nominated for the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction (Manitoba Writing and Publishing Awards).Journey from Zaire to Winnipeg to Ukraine and through the human spirit with an arrangement of characters and stories living in seasons but whose passages are perennial. Klassen’s characters transcend their variouscircumstances to explore personal experiences with an awareness of larger social issues—contemporary and historical.

With intellectual energy, Sarah Klassen takes the reader on an unforgettable journey by Klassen’s unsettling, stimulating and wonderful experiences in Israel/ Palestine and Lithuania, as well as life at home. Combined with reflections on nature, the poems explore the ongoing challenge of how to live in this world with compassion, hope and faith. Nature and personal experience, beyond what media and books can convey, bring together both the spiritual and physical dimensions of living in this conflicted world. Remaining firmly grounded in reality, Klassen seeks enlightenment and higher understanding of humanity through moments of clarity.

An intimate, powerfully written, collection of stories featuring characters who seldom find themselves present in Canadian fiction - ordinary middle class people. A Feast of Longing presents a fourteen-course banquet of characters whose common thread is their own longing D for significance, for meaning in their lives, for their troubles to pass, for guilt to let them go. Inspired by a charismatic speaker to side with the poor, a woman volunteers at a charity soup kitchen and is intimidated by one of the patrons she tries to befriend. A man whose son has been arrested for several crimes tries to find some peace in regular visits to a church. A first year university student reluctantly befriends her aunt's neighbour, a mentally challenged woman. With a poet's eye, ear and heart, sharpened over the creation of five collections of verse, Sarah Klassen brings an insight into characters and a depth to her stories that is not often found in short fiction. In every story optimism is present, but is tempered by the presence, or at least the awareness, of life's cruel underside, adding an extra power to the work."

Things are not well with the Wittenbergs. Alice has given birth to her second child with a genetic disorder. Millicent has withdrawn into a depression. Joseph has to choose between being principal of George Sutton Collegiate and the new English teacher. And Mia finds herself at the mercy of an unsympathetic teacher while the attractive athletic neighbour ignores her. Only the oldest Wittenberg, the matriarch who holds the key to the family's Mennonite past, can lead the Wittenbergs along the Dnieper River and toward a better tomorrow.

In this inaugural volume of the Lyrik Poetry Series, honouring Canada's foremost Mennonite poets, CMU Press presents the finest work, past and present, of Manitoba's wonderful Sarah Klassen, who has been publishing poetry since her award-winning first collection in 1988, Journey to Yalta. In a long and distinguished poetry career, Klassen has explored hope and suffering, language and its limits, movement and stillness-always inviting readers into her care. Including an introduction by editor Nathan Dueck and an afterword by the poet, this volume presents new and uncollected poems as well as a generous selection from Sarah Klassen's eight books of poetry. Full of faith, curiosity, and surprise, these poems offer readers grace and insight at every turn.