Author Margaret Sweatman explains that the writing of her third novel, When Alice Lay Down with Peter, was “compelled by the idea that history is constantly present. I wrote it in a crow’s nest, a high, windowed room overlooking the Red River I felt [Louis] Riel watching me…. The place was haunted.” And, indeed, the sense that the present layers the past as loosely as a sheet of waxed paper, that ghosts are jostling for elbow room even in the open-sky Prairies, imbues every page and paragraph of the novel.

The word “epic” gets tossed around fairly casually these days, but it really does apply here. The book is narrated by 109-year-old Blondie McCormack, the by-product of the aforementioned lying down with Peter. Her prodigious memory goes back to the moment of her conception in 1869, when her parents (her mother disguised as a man) were hunting buffalo in what would become Manitoba. There they join the rebel Métis, led by Riel, in their uprising. A roundly pregnant Alice, still impersonating a fat man swaddled in buffalo robes, later takes part in the firing squad that executes Orangeman Thomas Scott, an act that ultimately leads to Riel’s death sentence.

The story hurtles through the next century or so of history, starting from the Boer War (cross-dressing by Blondie here, so she can be a soldier), through the seeding of the prairies with wheat and immigrants, the First World War, the Winnipeg General Strike, the Depression (third-generation cross-dressing, as Blondie’s daughter Helen rides the rails as a hobo), the Second World War, and a flood.

All of these stark acts and facts of history are lovingly embroidered by Sweatman’s gift for description: winter days are “as crisp and short and dark as an eighth note”; a stilted dinner consists “of steamed curiosity and fried frustration.” When Alice Lay Down with Peter is an exuberant, generous, magical retelling of Canadian history. Producers of Heritage Minutes and beer commercials, take note.