Martha Brooks was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on July 15, 1944. However, while Winnipeg continued to be her home, she actually spent her first seventeen years on the grounds of the Manitoba Sanatorium at Ninette in southwestern Manitoba, where her father, Alfred Leroy Paine, was the superintendent and chief surgeon and her mother, Theodis, was a nurse.

Brooks received the Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Book Award for Paradise Cafe and Other Stories. Someone had remarked about her ability to write so well of isolation, and while she graciously accepted the compliment, Brooks explained that she wrote well about isolation because it was a subject with which she had much personal experience. A second child, Brooks was eight when her sister left for university and fourteen when she returned. Because of her father's position at the Ninette facility, which provided health care for people who had contracted...