From its first edition in 1989, this celebrated annual fiction anthology has consistently introduced readers to the next generation of great Canadian writers. With settings ranging from Thailand and war-torn Vietnam to a tiki bar in the Prairies, the thirteen stories in this collection represent the year’s best short fiction by some of our most exciting emerging writers.
A friendship between two older women frays at the seams during a trip to Barcelona. After the sudden death of her grandmother, a student from Uganda finds solace in a chance encounter. Confused parents can only watch as their son’s precocious understanding of the path to enlightenment leads him further into the unknown. The complexities of love reveal themselves as a family gathers by their mother’s deathbed to say goodbye. As she waits to confront a student who has cheated on an assignment, a philosophy professor must contend with surprising photos posted on Facebook. A man begins a relationship with a scientist who wears a mechanical bear suit. While her community mourns in the aftermath of a tragedy, a woman must face her own complicity in what happened to her best friend. After she makes an instant connection with a man during a day trip to the Smithsonian, a writing student’s struggle to find her own voice takes on greater urgency when he visits her at home. When a family reunion at a lakeside cottage is interrupted by the search for a drowned man’s body, long-submerged desires and resentments gradually surface. Two sex addicts fall into a complicated sort of love.
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