A Grandmother Begins the Story

A Novel

By: Michelle Porter

Narrated by: Michelle Porter, Jani Lauzon, Tara Sky, Tantoo Cardinal, Dakota Ray Hebert, Bernard Starlight, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, Yolanda Bonnell, Jenny Pudavick, Lisa Cromarty, Monique Mojica, Alison Deon, Jacob MacInnis, Kiawentiio

National Bestseller
Winner of the 2024 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award
Finalist for the 2023 Writers' Trust Atwood Gibson Fiction Prize


Five generations of Métis women argue, dance, struggle, laugh, love, and tell the stories that will sing their family, and perhaps the land itself, into healing in this brilliantly original debut novel.

Carter is a young mother, recently separated. She is curious, angry, and on a quest to find out what the heritage she only learned of in her teens truly means.

Allie is trying to make up for the lost years with her first born, and to protect Carter from the hurt she herself suffered from her own mother.

Lucie wants the granddaughter she's never met to help her join her ancestors in the Afterlife.

Geneviève is determined to conquer her demons before the fire inside burns her up, with the help of the sister she lost but has never been without.

And Mamé, in the Afterlife, knows that all their stories began with her; she must find a way to loose herself from the last threads that keep her tethered to the living, just as they must find their own paths forward.

This extraordinary novel, told by a chorus of vividly realized, funny, wise, confused, struggling characters—including descendants of the bison that once freely roamed the land—heralds the arrival of a stunning new voice in literary fiction.

©2023 Michelle Porter (P)2023 Viking

Critic reviews

“A Grandmother Begins the Story blows the doors off the typical family saga. . . . Beautiful and daring, this book carries the weight of history lightly, and is full of surprises and shifts—we move between this world and the afterlife, human and animal characters, in a great imaginative dance. The story’s striking voices resound long after the final page.”
—2023 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Jury

“A Grandmother Begins the Story will leave you forever charmed and soulspun. What a vision. What courage to blow a hole through all expectations of what a story can be and how it's told, and what a masterwork from a voice I'd follow anywhere. This is why we read and this is why we write: to discover places and voices and visions like these.” —Richard van Camp, award-winning author of Godless but Loyal to Heaven and The Moon of Letting Go

"Michelle Porter’s novel, A Grandmother Begins the Story, is charged with huge blasts of imaginative force—magical in every way. In this novel, divided families come together, there are wise bison, and dogs with opinions, an Indigenous family history spanning generations. Here is heaven and then, what the rest of these vivid characters must contend with, life on earth, with all its splendor and heartbreak. Porter is sometimes knee-slappingly funny, sometimes wry, poignant, nuanced, and gleefully irreverent. But this novel is full of reverence for the most important things: music and stories. Porter’s characters are tough and tender, courageous and flawed, and so true to life you’ll go back to the beginning as soon as you turn the last page, because you can't stand for it to be over. Michelle Porter’s voice is unique, uber-alive, utterly gorgeous. Just, WOW!" —Lisa Moore, award-winning author of This is How We Love and Caught