Kyp Harness

The Abandoned

Kyp Harness

Among the strip malls, industrial parks and overpasses of Southwestern Ontario, Tim is a young misfit with an overactive imagination and a heavy-drinking father, surrounded by bullies at school and wondering if he’ll ever be normal. He experiences first love with another high school student, Sherrie, and at the same time he meets his first friend, Russ. In pursuing Sherrie, Tim is drawn into a cult-like religious retreat, and his friendship with Russ takes a strange turn as the three teenagers confront their vanishing childhood. The Abandoned  is the dense and dazzling follow up to Harness’s critically acclaimed novel,  Wigford Rememberies . Praise for  Wigford Rememberies : “Pen in hand, there seems to be nothing Harness cannot do.”— The Globe and Mail “Kyp Harness’ prose has a unique flow: word and action, thought and thing are all contiguous and combined in lovely braided sentences. There’s some Joyce splashed around  Wigford Rememberies , a satisfying read. This is a fantastic book. Please just read it.”—Tony Burgess “Told with unshrinking honesty and real compassion …these characters and their stories will linger with readers.”— Publishers Weekly

Wigford Rememberies

Kyp Harness

Wigford is a small town in rural Southwestern Ontario, home to a cast of recurring characters: Buzz, a drunk-driving father of two; his wife, who should have married Bert Walmsley instead; Happy Henry, a devout, socially inept apostle who loves to play the organ; Elmer, a stroke survivor.Wigford Rememberies tells this community's stories through an impressionistic series of vignettes. The language is inventive, innovative and exciting, and whether describing mucking out the pig barn—“there in the dust and the sweet smells of grain and straw and the heavy brown odour of shit so strong it makes you sneeze"—or helping a drunk articulate how to manipulate God's forgiveness—“‘if I gave my heart to Jesus—right there on my deathbed the minute before I died—he'd forgive everything an I'd go up into Heaven and be saved just as much as the other guy who never did nothin' wrong at all with no difference?'"—Harness wields words with an eye for detail, musicality and style.Visceral, reflective and lyrical, Wigford Rememberies is a poetic evocation of mood and epiphanic realizations, and will resonate with anyone who has ever confronted suffering, love or the unknowable.