These eight stories reveal a world that’s both recognizable and strange: cities of anxiety and violence, where quiet inhabitants lead outwardly banal lives that conceal sinister interiors. The premises, both fantastic and surreal, are also eerily plausible; they often follow the logic of dreams where the real can appear in disguise. Though geographically rooted, the setting – from Ottawa to Toronto and the South of France – take on an ephemeral dimension: the geography is of the subconscious.
With his darkly philosophical bent and sly humour, Alexis has fashioned an underworld and limned it with light. Despair quakes with life and sings with the imaginative brilliance of one of the most accomplished new talents writing today.
André Alexis is the author of Fifteen Dogs, which won the Giller Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and Canada Reads. His internationally acclaimed debut, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. He is the author of Days by Moonlight, which won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was longlisted for the Giller Prize; The Hidden Keys, which was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award; Pastoral, which was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; A (a novella); Beauty and Sadness, which was longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature; Asylum; and Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize (Canada and the Caribbean). He is also the author of Ingrid and the Wolf, which was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Children’s Fiction and the play Lambton Kent. He wrote librettos for James Rolfe’s operas Orpheus and Eurydice and Aeneas and Dido. He has been a regular book reviewer for the Globe and Mail, and was the host and writer of CBC Radio One’s “Radio Nomad” and CBC Radio 2’s “Skylarking.” In 2017, he was awarded the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for fiction. Alexis lives in Toronto.
