Mary Burpee (1918- ) was born on an Alberta homestead and lived a full life on an Alberta farm raising Arabian horses and performing other farm work, while enjoying the full view of the aurora borealis. After travelling the world, she wrote vivid travelogues, and she has also published many articles about farm life. Her books "Musk Oxen of Gango" and "Horses Around My Heart" have been published by Borealis Press. Although diagnosed with cancer, she still rides an Arabian horse.

   Mary Burpee (nee Kennedy) was born on an Alberta homestead. As a child she was fascinated by the stories her father told her about growing up in Dublin and Bantry.
   Her life-long interest in her Irish roots, fostered by the stories her father told and furthered by some interesting genealogical discoveries, was the compelling force behind Ebony Angel.
   Ebony Angel is a historical novel set in 19th century Ireland. The main characters are fictitious. Some of what happens to them is not. The beautiful, head-strong, horse-loving protagonist rails against the harsh and unfair laws heaped on Irish Catholics by their English rulers. For generations those laws fostered a hatred of anything English - a force that has been like bubbles bursting in a pot of porridge. In Ebony Angel those bursting bubbles shatter dreams, destroy lives. It is a page-turner with an unusual twist. Its sequel, Shades of Ebony, is in the works.

   Horses Around My Heart, about horses that have been special in the author´s life, is the second Borealis Press publication for Mary Burpee. Her first book, Musk Oxen of Gango, delighted readers of all ages.
   Darky, a horse that once out-raced the stork and the doctor´s new Buick, considered it his duty to chase strange horses and small children out of his pasture, became a Pegasus for a little girl.
   Jack is a school pony of many quirks.
   Rowdy is a work horse that when saddled saw itself as a Knight´s great white charger but was a dismal failure at herding gophers.
   Paddy might have made a school pony if it hadn´t had a phobia for chasing cars.
   Pompey, a Morgan with a "little bit of Arabian blood," helped head the author towards her destiny. Khem, an Arabian stallion that made dreams come true, had to live with a nightmare.

How could one explain why an animal threatening to charge and annihilate a man one minute would walk up to him when he had stretched out full length on the straw outside her pen, and lie down as close to him as the rails separating them would allow? The Musk Oxen of Gango is a unique true story about "the wildest, most dangerous of all Arctic mammals," and a man who had the courage to try and flesh out a dream against unsurmountable odds. It is about his winning the complete trust and friendship of animals sometimes thought of as prehistoric survivors of the last ice age. It is about their personalities, their intelligence, their sense of humour. There is no other book quite like it.