Originally published in 2017, The Marrow Thieves is a young-adult novel by Cherie Dimaline, a Métis writer and activist from the Georgian Bay Métis Nation in Canada. Critics have described the novel as dystopian, speculative fiction, science fiction, and climate fiction. This is because it incorporates fantastical elements to speculate about a not-too-distant future in which humans have destroyed planet earth by causing climate change.
Critics have received the book positively and it has won many awards. At the time of its publication in 2017, the novel won the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction and the Kirkus Prize in the young-adult literature category. Kirkus Reviews praised The Marrow Thieves, writing that the novel depicts “a dystopian world that is all too real and that has much to say about our own.” In 2018, Dimaline’s novel won the Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature as well as the Sunburst Award for young adult fiction. The Globe and Mail included The Marrow Thieves on its list of 100 best books of 2017. The Globe and Mail reviewer reflected that "Dimaline takes one of the most well-known tropes in YA—the dystopia—and uses it to draw explicit parallels between the imagined horrors of a fictional future and the true historical horrors of colonialism and residential schools." The review described the book as "beautifully written as it is shocking and painful."
