(Alia Youssef)

There are bestselling authors, and then there is Cherie Dimaline. Her publisher Cormorant Books announced on Feb. 4 that her young-adult novel The Marrow Thieves will enter its 20th printing with more than 100,000 copies sold in Canada.

“Grateful for a lot of reasons, one of them being that this book has allowed me to keep writing,” Dimaline wrote on Facebook in response to the news. The novel, about a small group of Indigenous people in a dystopian future who are trying to evade those who would harvest their bone marrow as a way to restore their ability to dream, was published with Cormorant’s Dancing Cat Books imprint on May 10, 2017. It went on to become the bestselling Canadian book in 2018 and the third bestselling Canadian book in 2019.

Though The Marrow Thieves has already hit such milestones as appearing on Canada Reads and winning the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Kirkus Prize, there’s reason to believe the brisk sales will continue. Dimaline is currently writing and executive producing a television series based on the book, which has attracted interest from Warner Brothers and Netflix. Also, after being booed in classrooms across the country when she’d say she wouldn’t write another book set in the universe, she has told her agents that a sequel is possible.

Dimaline’s most recent book, the adult thriller Empire of Wild, was the first in a four-book deal with Penguin Random House Canada. Reacting to The Marrow Thieves’ new milestone on Facebook, she cryptically teased her next announcement. “Stay tuned for more good news, friends,” she wrote.