There were moments while I read Tim Bowling’s novel The Bone Sharps when I found myself gripped by the same thrilling sense of discovery that drives the proto-paleontologists of his novel. Reading the book, I felt a certain kinship with these fossil hunters who spent countless hours combing barren landscapes in the hopes of unearthing even a fragment of ancient bone. Clearly, there is a difference between sifting through mediocre books searching for glimmers of greatness and scraping away limestone to reveal dinosaur bones, but in both cases the excitement of finding something fantastic is the reward for hours of fruitless toil. Books like The Bone Sharps make it all worthwhile.

This fictionalized account of Charles Sternberg and his lifetime devotion to collecting and identifying dinosaur bones is a fascinating and well-crafted tale. From his days as a student of the pioneering paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope to his travails in the Black Hills of the Dakotas and the badlands of Alberta, Bowling re-creates Sternberg’s life with a keen eye for detail and a shrewd understanding of the human psyche. A seemingly contradictory character whose deep faith seems at odds with his devotion to science, he emerges as the book develops as a figure standing with one foot in the distant centuries and the other in modernity.

When we first meet Sternberg, it is 1916 and he is leading a new generation of bone hunters into Alberta’s bone yards, though his protégé Scott Cameron is unable to join them, otherwise occupied in the trenches of France. Along with the party is Lily, a young woman who assists the expedition while anxiously awaiting news from the front. Shifting between characters and decades, Bowling creates a world that is easy to get lost in, with secondary stories that are equally compelling as the main one.

While his characters are compelling, his deft description of place also deserves merit. Barren landscapes come to life under Bowling’s skillful hand, and I swear I caught a whiff of sagebrush when reading his depictions of the Red Deer Valley. He celebrates the hugeness of the western landscape, and his depictions of hoodoos and canyons and ochre earth transported me to my own childhood memories of camping in Dinosaur Provincial Park. It was in these passages that I recognized this book as an undeniably Albertan artifact.

Bowling, an Edmonton-based writer perhaps best known for his collections of poetry that have been shortlisted for Governor General’s awards, writes with a literary grace that is reminiscent of Jane Urquhart and Timothy Findley. The Bone Sharps is one of the best books about Alberta I’ve ever read, and one of the best Canadian books published last year. Smart, literary and focused on a period of history that few people give much thought to, The Bone Sharps is well worth searching out.