AND ALSO SHARKS
Jessica Westhead
The forlornly funny stories in And Also Sharks celebrate the socially awkward, the insecure, the unfulfilled, and the obsessed.
A disgruntled follower of a self-esteem blog posts a rambling critical comment. On the hunt for the perfect coffee table, a pregnant woman and her husband stop to visit his terminally ill ex-wife. The office cat lady reluctantly joins her fellow employees’ crusade to cheer up their dying co-worker. A man grieving his wife's miscarriages follows his deluded friend on a stealth photo-taking mission at the Auto Show. A shoplifter creates her own narrative with stolen anecdotes and a kidnapped baby.
In this collection, society's misfits and losers are portrayed sympathetically, and sometimes even heroically. As desperately as these characters long to fit in, they also take pride in what sets them apart.
Cormorant Books, paperback, 9781770860032 (March 15, 2011)
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BROWN DWARF
K. D. Miller
When Brenda Bray, better known to the world as Rae Brand, author of the popular Elsinor Grey mystery series, returns home to Hamilton, she is set upon by vivid memories of the fall of 1962 when she struck up an intense relationship with a classmate, and together they sought to track and catch an escaped serial killer believed to be hiding out on the escarpment. Brenda and Jori search for this elusive murderer, their friendship twisting as the weeks pass, becoming tautly fantastic and pre-adolescently sexual, eventually resulting in real tragedy. As the story of their brief time together unravels it becomes apparent that the headlines about Jori's disappearance only touch on the truth, and that Brenda must finally face up to that youthful friendship and its results if she is going to discover any peace. Brown Dwarf is an intense and thrilling psychological drama.
Biblioasis, paperback, 9781897231883
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SUB ROSA
Amber Dawn
In this stunning debut novel, Amber Dawn subverts and transgresses the classic hero's quest adventure to create a dark post-feminist vision not for the faint of heart. Sub Rosa's reluctant heroine is known as "Little," a teenaged runaway unable to remember her real name; in her struggle to get by in the world, she stumbles upon an underground society of ghosts and magicians, missing girls and would-be johns: a place called Sub Rosa. Not long after she is initiated into this family of magical prostitutes, Little is called upon to lead Sub Rosa through a maze of feral darkness, both real and imagined―a calling burdened with grotesque enemies, strange allies, and memories from a foggy past.
Written with a kind of gasping urgency, Sub Rosa is a beautiful and gutsy allegory of our times, a fairy-tale-like fantasia imbued with a grave, unapologetic realness.
A uniquely rewarding read… Amber Dawn keeps the proceedings at a darkly whimsical remove from the real hurts of the world. She knows we know that pain is real, that women are made chattels, that masters are cruel. She's after a larger vision that raises questions about the entire emotionally fraught edifice of our received beliefs about sex, men and women, roles and rights and abuses. — The Globe and Mail
Arsenal Pulp Press, paperback, 9781551523613
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PARADISE GARDEN (DRAMA)
Lucia Frangione
In the gold-rush era of the 1850s, the McKinnons settled on an island off the west coast of Canada, where the first thing they did was to turn this "wilderness" into an English country garden. After six generations, times and circumstances have changed, the family estate has been subdivided, the flowers have gone wild, the pear-tree has rotted and the heritage house has been carved up into a duplex, the property now divided in two by an ugly hedge.
The McKinnons now live in one side of the property, while the other has been sold to an immigrant family recently arrived from Turkey. The heirs apparent to both families, Day McKinnon and Layla Zeki, fancy themselves to be sophisticated citizens of the world, tolerating with thinly disguised amusement their ancestors' "outdated" formalities and rituals. So alienated are they that they spend much of their time only half-jokingly speaking of themselves in the third person. Yet Layla recognizes something fundamental and mysterious in the vestiges of the old garden. For Day, however, despite, or perhaps because of the fact that he has discovered a long-buried family secret, "The problem with being born into paradise is: eventually you inherit it. There's something to be said for the bedlam of hell. Heaven is a lot of upkeep." Abandoning their families for their careers, they are reunited years later having discovered that love is not just something that happens to us, but something that we must build by hand in the wilderness of our lives.
Award-winning playwright and actress Lucia Frangione has emerged from Canada's independent theatre scene to take her place as an important, young post-feminist voice on the lives of women in the post-modern world. She is the recipient of the 2006 and 1998 Gordon Armstrong Playwright Awards and won the Sydney Risk playwright award for Cariboo Magi in 2001. Espresso was nominated for seven Jessie awards, and toured Western Canada in 2004. Her twenty plays have been produced by theatres such as The Belfry Theatre, Alberta Theatre Projects, Lambs Players San Diego, Ruby Slippers, Solo Collective, Chemainus Theatre and Prairie Theatre Exchange.
Talon Books, paperback, 9780889226586 (March 7, 2011)
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DRIFT CHILD
Rosella Leslie
Emma Phillips is 35 years old, divorced, depressed… adrift. But when extraordinary circumstances force her to take care of three traumatized, newly orphaned children, this lifelong free spirit finds motherhood may in fact be her true calling. Part adventure novel, part kitchen-sink drama, Drift Child is firmly rooted in Vancouver Island geography and culture.
Rosella Leslie was born in Edmonton, and grew up in small towns throughout Alberta and British Columbia before settling in Sechelt. She is one of the authors of Stain Upon the Sea: West Coast Salmon Fishing, which won the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize at the 2005 British Columbia Book Awards. Her first solo novel, The Goat Lady's Daughter, was published in 2006.
NeWest Press, paperback, 978-1897126714
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