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Pure Fiction
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| What do cowboy-noir, stories of the betrayed and estranged and the friendship between neighbours share in common? The fiction of Brad Smith, Stephen Finucan and Lesley Krueger are all part of this month's Pure Fiction spotlight. Find out more about their new releases below... |
| Though unique in setting and tone, each of the Pure Fiction authors this month share a passion for storytelling and a talent for getting inside the lives and imaginations of their characters. |
| In Lesley Krueger's The Corner Garden, we encounter two very different women: the precocious and cynical fifteen-year-old, Jessie Barfoot, and her mysterious elderly neighbour, Martha van Tellingen. |
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Switching between the voices of Jessie, the teenage Martha and present-day Martha, The Corner Garden charts the interweaving of the two women's lives and the impact it has on each of them. War, betrayal, loneliness and self-deception all figure in their story as it moves to a shocking and unsettling conclusion.
To write her novel, Krueger first sat down to record the world around her. She took notes on weather, jokes, the news and overheard conversations. Then she created two characters to place in this world. As she explains: "Into this real setting, I dropped a pair of fictional characters: Jessie Barfoot, the embodiment of curiosity, and Martha van Tellingen — who was Jessie's age during the Second World War — a repository of secrets. What would happen if I made them next-door neighbours? It seemed an interesting experiment..."
In Brad Smith's novel All Hat, we enter the distinct but lyrical world of Ray Dokes, a former ballplayer and ex-con who is determined to put his life back on track. Ray returns to his hometown and soon crosses paths with an old enemy, Sonny Stanton — a sadistic bully who harbours secret plans for the development of a parcel of prime farmland. When Sonny's prized thoroughbred goes missing, Ray hits upon a scheme to turn the tables on his nemesis and right a few wrongs in the process.
As Smith puts it: "Ray is fresh out of jail and on parole. One false move and he's back in stir. So, for the time being, his main objectives are to walk a straight and narrow line and keep out of trouble. But, while walking that famed line might have been a snap for Johnny Cash, for Ray the line is neither as straight nor as narrow as advertised and the day comes when crossing it seems the only thing to do. On a day like that, a guy's just bound to get into trouble."
Troubles of a different sort inform the short stories in Stephen Finucan's collection Foreigners. In settings ranging from small-town Ontario to Belgium to the Caribbean, Finucan's stories introduce us to characters grappling with loneliness, betrayal, illness and heartache. Tracking the relationships between brothers, lovers and a widower, to name just a few, Finucan offers a piercing look at the emotional complexities of our efforts to connect with others and to ourselves.
For Finucan, it is this glimpse into the lives of others, that makes stories so compelling: "For a short time we are given entreé into the world of another, priviledged to observe their intimacies and their fears, allowed to bear witness as a moment in their lives unfolds, a moment that will either sustain or destroy them. And some of these lives, fictional though they be, we carry with us."
To read more about Smith, Finucan and Krueger, as well as other Pure Fiction authors, explore the links to the left for book excerpts, reading group guides, author biographies and more... |
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