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Join Shelf Life Books and University of Calgary Press for this special triple book launch. The novels are Kit Dobson's We are Already Ghosts, Ben Ghan's The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits and Carleigh Baker's Last Woman. With an introduction by Brave and Brilliant series editor Aritha van Herk.ABOUT WE ARE ALREADY GHOSTS
Playful, witty, and sharp, We are Already Ghosts is a summer book, a family story, a meditation of the persistence of place, and a chronicle of a time only just passed into memory. We are Already Ghosts joins the Briscoe-MacDougalls in the summer of 1996 and returns to them at five-year intervals. William, Clare, Helen, Michael, John, Doug, Mike, Jéanne, Françoise, Celeste, Daphne, Benjamin, and Mackenzie the dog live, grow up, and grow old as the world changes in small ways and in devastating ones.
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Kit Dobson lives in Calgary, Treaty 7, in southern Alberta. He is the author or editor of eight previous books, including Malled: Deciphering Shopping in Canada and Field Notes on Listening, one of the CBC’s top non-fiction books of 2022. We Are Already Ghosts is his first novel.
ABOUT THE YEARS SHALL RUN LIKE RABBITS
A gorgeously complex work of literary speculative fiction that spans centuries The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits starts in 2014 with a winged alien sowing the seeds of a strange forest on the moon. The novel then moves through humanity’s colonization of the moon and its consequences, onto a war with alien beings within a spacefaring whale, a cyborg mind that sleeps for hundreds of years after sheltering the city of Toronto from the worst of the war and finally a recreation of humanity. Ghan poses thoughtful questions about artificial intelligence, humanity's quest for the stars and ecological destruction in this wide-ranging story, which is held together equally by beautiful writing and deft characterization. The end result is an ambitious debut that leaves the reader contemplating many amazing possibilities for the future of our world.
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Ben Ghan is a writer and educator from Toronto whose prose and poetry has been published in Clarkseworld, Strange Horizons, and more. He is the author of The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits. He now lives and works in Calgary, AB.
ABOUT LAST WOMAN
There’s a hole in the ozone layer. Are teenage girls to blame?
Floods and wildfires, toxic culture, billionaires in outer space, or a purse-related disaster while on mushrooms—in today’s hellscape world, there’s no shortage of things to worry about. Last Woman, the new collection of short fiction by award-winning author Carleigh Baker, wants you to know that you’re not alone. In these 13 brilliant new stories, Baker and her perfectly-drawn characters are here for you—in fact, they’re just as worried and weirded-out as everyone else.
A woman’s dream of poetic solitude turns out to be a recipe for loneliness. A retiree is convinced that his silence is the only thing that will prevent a deadly sinkhole. An emerging academic wakes up and chooses institutional violence. A young woman finds sisterhood in a strange fertility ritual, and an enigmatic empath is on a cleanse. Baker’s characters are both wildly misguided and a product of the misguided times in which we live. Through them we see our world askew and skewered—and, perhaps, we can begin to see it anew.
Carleigh Baker’s signature style is irreverent, but her heart is true—these stories delve into fear for the future, intergenerational misunderstandings, and the complexities of belonging with sharp wit and boundless empathy. With equal parts compassion and critique, she brings her clear-eyed attention to bear on our world, and the results are hilarious, heartbreaking, and startling in their freshness.
Reserve your copy here: https://store.shelflifebooks.ca/?q=h.tviewer&using_sb=status&qsb=keyword&qse=ssARrWrToAbi2kgvvUh4rQ
Carleigh Baker is an nêhiyaw âpihtawikosisân /Icelandic writer and author of Last Woman. Her debut story collection, Bad Endings, won the City of Vancouver Book Award and was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Award, the Emerging Indigenous Voices Award for fiction, and the BC Book Prize Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award.
Aritha van Herk is a professor, award-winning author, member of the Order of Canada, fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and member of the Alberta Order of Excellence. She is the editor of Brave & Brilliant, the boundary-pushing literary series published by the University of Calgary Press.
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