Bøger af Amber McMillan

Finalist, New Brunswick Book Award (Fiction) and Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short FictionA striking original, deftly humorous collection of stories that considers the quest for truth: how we come to it or alternatively avoid it.A fervently comic debut, The Running Trees leads readers into a series of conversations -- through phonelines, acts in a play, and a rewound recording of a police interrogation -- to reveal characters in fumbling bouts of brutality, reflection, isolation, and love.The relationship between two siblings disintegrates after one asks the other for the pen; a professor and his former student get drinks years after a "romantic" encounter; a book club meets only to find that they have wildly different opinions about a new memoir about their town; and a long-haired feline contemplates existence and consciousness while his cohabitant licks his own butthole.Whimsical, unconventional, humorous, and always pitch-perfect, The Running Trees explores how we desperately try to communicate with each other amid the gaps in meaning we create.

A brief and highly personal memoir that probes the unique and sometimes unsettling tenor of life on one of BCs smallest gulf islands. The measure of ones success here, the author discovers, doesnt rely on status or income, but on the ability to adapt both the rigorous outdoors of the Pacific Northwest and equally challenging human community of need, trade, and negotiated civility. These are stories of the people and families who sought refuge here, for different reasons and with different outcomes: a multi-talented retired sea captain who cant do enough for people and who just happens to be a cross-dresser; a city contractor whose idea of relaxing in the country is to spend his time running noisy power tools; a septuagenarian library curator who has happily re-discovered men and Scotch; and of various other transplants making their way through the tricky terrain of island living.