Walking the Bypass

Reviews / Votes

"[Walking the Bypass is] a book that uses the regional to unfold and to grapple with some of the most vital challenges of our time." "Wilson's gruelling and lengthy circumnavigation results not just in a conclusion, but also a transformation...It's a reason to be thankful for this extraordinary book." "What is Canada, if not a shady land deal? The travelogue portion of Walking the Bypass is sutured to a history of the Crown's abuses of Indigenous peoples...[Wilson's] guilt is the most affecting, visceral aspect of the book, and it kept me turning the pages...I see why he wants to make amends, find kinship with the land. But, in the Enshittocene, trading utility for futility is a form of resistance." "Walking the Bypass reminds settlers of the need to remember intergenerational responsibility, atonement, and decolonization-words that might describe a path forward. Let us stay the course." -- Louise Halfe-Sky Dancer, author of Burning in this Midnight Dream "Original, unsettling, and provocative." -- Candace Savage, author of A Geography of Blood "This book is an eyes-wide-open trek through a landscape almost entirely subsumed by the extractive forces of late-stage colonialism, but there is a much more beautiful pathway here, too-one worn by the steps of the author and other settlers looking for ways to walk side-by-side with Indigenous Peoples who are calling for land justice and an end to the racist and systemic inequality that remains Canada's festering wound." -- Trevor Herriot, author of Grass, Sky, and Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds "Seeking 'the sacred in the stubble,' Ken Wilson parses the movement of place to non-place and back again by walking the route of the Regina Bypass. To map the beginnings of connecting where you are with how you got there, read this book about roads, ecologically sensitive areas, and the ruderal on the desire path to decolonial thought with Wilson as your companion, one (sometimes blistered) step at a time." -- Tanis MacDonald, author of Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female "This lively story of one man's purposeful hike has a universal appeal for readers who care about the human connection to the land beneath our feet..." -- -JJury Citation, 2026 Saskatchewan Book Awards Non-Fiction Prize