‘Devastating and wickedly funny … I loved it’ Sophie Mackintosh’ ‘A dark star of a book’ Lauren Groff ‘I loved its every page’ Sheila HetiIt’s 1985 in The Territory and it always will be.It’s so cold you can’t feel your feet and from here the outside world is just a dream, but two humans and one animal will show us the way. They’re each searching for someone, a woman who washed up on the shores of this far-flung town and then disappeared. To find her they will have to look deep into the darkness that lies at the edge of love.Heartbreaker is an astounding feat of imagination with its own riotous rhythm and the resounding message that humanity can be found in the wildest of places.
Described by Variety as ‘Yukon Gothic,’ Claudia Dey’s acclaimed play Trout Stanley is set in northern British Columbia, on the outskirts of a mining town between Misery Junction and Grizzly Alley. In this inhospitable setting live a pair of sisters, twins who are not identical in any way: Sugar, a complicated, insecure waif who still wears the tracksuit her mother died in ten years prior, and Grace, a rough-and-tumble hellcat who owns the local dump. At the play’s opening, it is their thirtieth birthday, and the TV news has announced the disappearance of a local Scrabble-champ stripper. While Grace is at the dump, housebound Sugar is surprised by a mysterious drifter, one Trout Stanley, foot fetishist and fake cop, who is searching for the lake where his parents drowned – a fishy story if there ever was one. He quickly becomes mired in a surreal love triangle with the two sisters. Trout Stanley is about three people who confuse codependence for co-operation and affliction for affection. An eccentric, captivating story in which the biggest catch of all is love. Lavishly illustrated by Jason Logan.
Eugenia Ledoux wakes one morning to a note on the kitchen table: “Gone to save the world. Sorry. Yours, Sheb Woolly Ledoux. Asshole.” Eugenia is nine years old, a synaesthesiac and a tightrope walker. She adores her father and his lunatic charms; she loves that he takes her fishing in the middle of the night and calls her Stunt. Sheb has always promised he’ll one day take her to the moonscape of northern Ontario, where astronauts train; instead he writes a note, blows up a shoulder-pad factory, and leaves. His heartbroken daughter is left behind with her mother, the sharp-edged former ingenue Mink, and her sister, the death-obsessed and hauntingly beautiful Immaculata. After a fake funeral for Sheb, Mink vanishes too. Eugenia and Immaculata, left alone, double in age overnight. Immaculata becomes a swan-like giantess, and soon finds her calling caring for Leopold, a diseased and irresistible malcontent down the street. Eugenia, however, stays the same: dark and diminutive, and bereft. She finds herself a bicycle and sets off to track down her father, encountering an astronaut and a waitress named Cupid along the way. Stunt is the first novel by one of Canada’s most acclaimed playwrights. Like synaesthetic Eugenia, your senses will be addled as Dey’s words take on colours, tastes, and smells, somehow coming to mean more than you thought they did; they depict, with compassionate hilarity and luminous heartbreak, the love between a girl and her father.