JUNE 2024. A 2024 Seaboard Review Book Pick. Connected via the fictional town of St Anne’s, a community along Nova Scotia’s western shore, each story takes its title from the children’s rhyme Counting Crows. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a message, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven… Read more »
APRIL 2023. Questions surrounding his parents’ deaths have haunted Noah Lamarck for almost thirty years. Now he copes with a grandfather suffering from dementia and an overwhelmed grandmother, the two people who raised him in Cape Breton. Money is tight and problems multiply. After relocating to Toronto to help his estranged wife care for their… Read more »
Rosa Ost grows up in Notre-Dame-du-Cachalot, a tiny village at the end of the world, where two industries are king: paper and Boredom. The only daughter of Terese Ost (a fair-to-middling trade unionist and a first-rate Scrabble player), the fate that befalls Rosa is the focus of this tale of long journeys and longer lives,… Read more »
A boarding school deep in the forest carries the echoes of its past inhabitants. Hints of a disturbing history and the unfolding events of the present are refracted by the multiple voices of the girls who now live within its walls, their suggestive and enigmatic accounts interweaving in a rich and unsettling chorus. ABOUT THE… Read more »
While on vacation with her family in Valencia, Claire Halde witnesses a shocking event that becomes the catalyst for a protracted downward spiral and a profound personal unravelling as she struggles to come to grips with her role in the incident. This haunting novel, which unfolds across three timelines set in as many decades, takes… Read more »
In these 12 short stories, scurrying insects and luminous jellyfish reveal a predatory world of childhood fairy tales, lurking shadows, and unrelenting fevers. Individuals are swallowed up by cities and bogs in a celebration of nature and humanity, in all their terrifying glory. Throughout, Clerson draws—and blurs—the lines between man and beast, life and death,… Read more »
Excess and adventure abound as fresh, original writing draws us in to “surreal, hostile worlds.” We meet the leech-boys, a wooden puppet the brothers drag from the sea to become a member of the family, six pig-children, and more, all conveyed in a tone that lies somewhere between delirium and a disturbing dream. David Clerson’s… Read more »
