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Finalist for the Seventh Annual Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in the Literary Fiction category Includes author-curated discussion questions! Traci Skuce's Hunger Moon is a collection of stories that echo with the yearning to be replenished, to be made full. Here are characters at cusp-points in their lives, attempting to shift their trajectories: to cease wrapping up their heart's desire in a pink bubble by launching it into the universe. Some turn to ESP, some to a belief in ghosts, some to the future caught inside a glass bottle, each character taking the hackneyed adage "Follow Your Bliss" too literally to blissfully follow their own storyline. Emotional charged, evocative, and lush, Hunger Moon's thirteen short stories each set out on profound quests to satisfy an emotional hunger.
In this lyrical memoir, Lily Hoy Price writes with moving detail about her childhood and adolescence in a large Chinese Canadian family in the Cariboo country of northern British Columbia. The ninth daughter in a family of 12 children, Lily is an observant child who tucks away every image of life in rugged Quesnel during the 1930s for one unforgettable tale after another. She has carefully selected many of her father's early photographs to illustrate her stories. The celebrated pioneer photographer Chow Dong Hoy left a legacy of more the 1,500 photographs taken after 1909, and created an invaluable record of the cultural diversity of the Cariboo region. With similar sensitivity and the same ...
What I Want to Tell Goes Like This is an intensely original first short story collection from acclaimed poet Matt Rader. The last story, "All This Was a Long Time Ago," is the 2014 winner of the Jack Hodgins Founders' Award for fiction from The Malahat Review, and other offerings from the collection have appeared in Event, The New Quarterly, Grain, Joyland, Forget Magazine and the Rusty Toque. Rader's command of tension is masterful in these dark, off-kilter stories that are largely set in the context of the working/labour class in and around the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island, BC. They alternate between exploring the history of severe labour struggles in the area over a century ago, and t...
A lapsed religion still emits / faint signals; God, / in his satellite dish, / groans / moving on. To seek belonging, to strain against the familiar – these are the polarities many of us live between, feeling the pull of each desire. Offering a particular history, an intimate vantage point from within the various kingdoms we inhabit, Julie Paul’s The Rules of the Kingdom is an exploration of this struggle on a personal level and a universal one. Broken into five sections, the book examines the human struggle to find meaning, comfort, and a sense of home. In “Settlers’ Descendant Reclaims the Past,” the poems consider rural life, both the specific and the collective, including a vil...
Winner of the 2015 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize A Globe and Mail top 100 pick for 2014 Winner of a 2015 Independent Publisher Book Award Bronze Medal Twelve short stories that examine what happens in the lives of characters who discover shocking truths about the people they thought they knew best. Whether set in a cottage or a Montreal market, a graveyard or a backyard, these stories transport you into the lives of people you’ll recognize. Your neighbours may not want to make squirrels into pets or sell you a piece of the moon. Your son may not be asked to donate sperm to his girlfriend’s mother. Your sister may not want you to bring a dead cat across the border. You may not have an imaginary husband, a secret brother, or a friend who has turned to murder in a custody battle. But in each of these stories, people are trying to figure out how to live in a world that doesn’t always seem hospitable. With her keen poet’s eye, Julie Paul examines human nature and animal instinct, as the characters in The Pull of the Moon try to negotiate their impulses and desires. Ultimately, they want what most of us want: connection, belonging, love, and forgiveness.
In response to her brother's sudden death, Cornelia Hoogland explores the shift in gravity his dramatic absence creates. Set on the Salish Sea on Vancouver Island's east coast, Trailer Park Elegy reaches back two thousand years to the First Peoples, as well as to the brother whose delight was summers spent at Deep Bay. Hoogland looks to her child-experiences of death, as well as to literature, chaos theory, dark matter, geological time and the effect of noise pollution on whales. She turns grief round and round, enlarges it, pushes beyond received ideas of closure and grief's stages. Death is not only part of life; the dead assign their unfinished work to the living. Hoogland's narrator puts...
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Shortlisted for the 2020 ReLit Award for Short Fiction A collection of captivating stories that explore family dynamics and frailty, loss and atonement, faith and redemption. A young man takes his father to Hawaii, even though he’s been dead for months. An organ player won’t let her newly amputated arm stand in the way of Sunday duties. A grad student decides to take the fate of a homeless man into his own hands. A couple of criminals, new to rural living, find their idyllic life in jeopardy when nature strikes back. A stepdaughter moves in, a brother goes missing, and twins fall in love with the same girl. In Meteorites, Julie Paul’s third collection of short fiction, characters are taken by surprise and must react and recover from what’s entered their lives unbidden. Ghosts, giant animals, artists, imposters—you’ll meet them here in these captivating stories of family dynamics and frailty, loss and atonement, faith and redemption.
Christine Wright is having a bad day. She's an ex-special forces soldier and a recovering alcoholic, and now her new career as an Anglican Minister has started off with the worst kind of bang. Could it be her reflexes are a little too twitchy for this job? From the opening page, this fast-paced tale is all about a cover up: the burying of a body, while fending off an angry widow, and a very suspicious parishioner appalled by the loss of a precious church artifact. And then there's the vengeful plot of a terminally ill military-cop-turned-stalker who plans to get Christine locked up if it's the last thing he does. Among the many revelations and surprises we experience is the fact that we're instantly on the side of the unfailingly flawed and irreverent Christine--who cannot imitate a perfectly pious priest even though her life so clearly depends on it. Mystic Julian Norwich, she of the famous "all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well," is the patron saint of this wickedly funny novel. All Is Well for Katherine Walker's readers despite, or because of, Reverend Wright's many wrongs.