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9781897141359_cover

Blood Relatives

by Craig Francis Power
edited by Stan Dragland

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list price: $21.00
edition:Paperback
category: Fiction
published: 2010
ISBN:9781897141359
publisher: Pedlar Press
Description

Part outlaw country song, part satirical poke at slumming as a right-of-passage, Blood Relatives tells the story of Charlie, a down-on-his-luck thirty-one year old office cleaner, whose life, since the death of his father, is out of control. Darkly comic in intent, at times hilarious, at other times unnerving, Blood Relatives creates an utterly believable fictional world that turns the conventions of the coming-of-age novel inside out. The reader follows Charlie from bad to worse, encountering along the way his unforgettable entourage, among them Hank Kinsella, dark mentor, street philosopher, Newfoundland nationalist, maker of toy Newfoundland dogs, who as a baby would not drink milk from a bottle, only Tang warmed in a pot on the stove. Is Charlie simply a nice young man who has lost his way or a young man coming into possession of a dark genetic inheritance? And just how low can he sink? The reader can only hang on as this pitch-perfect and visceral novel careens towards its conclusion, an anti-epiphany that leaves both protagonist and reader just a little wiser. - Fresh Fish Award jury citation"Blood Relatives brings Newfoundland to light in all her dark comic glory." - Patrick Warner, poet, winner of the 2007 EJ Pratt Award

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About the Authors

Craig Francis Power

Craig Francis Power

Craig Francis Power lives in St. John's NL. Blood Relatives, winner of both the Percy Janes First Novel Award and the Fresh Fish Award for unpublished fiction manuscripts, is Power's debut work.
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Stan Dragland

Stan Dragland

Stan Dragland was born and brought up in Alberta. He was educated at The University of Alberta and Queen's University. He has taught at the University of Alberta, at The Grammar School, Sudbury, Suffolk, England, in the English Department at the University of Western Ontario in London, and in the Banff Centre Writing Studio. He now lives in St. John's, Newfoundland. He was founding editor of Brick, a journal of reviews and founder of Brick Books, a poetry publishing house, which he still serves as publisher and editor. Between 1993 and 1996 he was poetry editor for McClelland and Stewart. He has published three previous books of fiction: Peckertracks, a Chronicle (shortlisted for the 1978 Books in Canada First Novel Prize), Journeys Through Bookland and Other Passages, and (for children) Simon Jesse's Journey. He has edited collections of essays on Duncan Campbell Scott and James Reaney. Wilson MacDonald's Western Tour, a 'critical collage,' has been followed by two other books of criticism, The Bees of the Invisible: Essays in Contemporary English Canadian Writing and Floating Voice: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Literature of Treaty 9, which won the 1995 Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian Literary Criticism. 12 Bars, a prose blues, was co-winner of the bp Nichol Chapbook Award in 2003, the same year Apocrypha: Further Journeys appeared in NeWest Press's Writer-as-Critic series. Apocrypha was winner of the Rogers Cable Non-Fiction Award in 2005. In April 2004 the stage adaptation of HalldÛr Laxness's The Atom Station, co-written with Agnes Walsh, was performed at the LSPU Hall in St. John's. His most recent book is Stormy Weather: Foursomes, prose poetry from Pedlar Press, was shortlisted for the EJ Pratt Poetry Award in 2007. He is editor of the recently-released Hard-Headed and Big-Hearted: Writing Newfoundland, a collection of essays by Newfoundland historian Stuart Pierson.
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