Village of the Small Houses is Ian Ferguson's hilariously offbeat account of growing up poor in the far north. In 1959, just one step ahead of the law, Ferguson's con-artist dad, Hank, headed north in a beat-up Mercury Zephyr with his pregnant wife, Louise. He got as far as isolated Fort Vermilion, where he passed himself off as a teacher at the "Indian school" and settled his ever-expanding family in a house without plumbing or electricity.

Ferguson's gifts as a comic actor and writer come to the fore in this spirited reading of his best-selling memoir about a scrappy northern childhood. Interweaving truth and fiction, and introducing a cast of lovable misfits, this tenderly amusing chronicle is a cross between Angela's Ashes and W.O. Mitchell's Who Has Seen the Wind.