This remarkable novel about myth-making and survival opens in rural Nova Scotia, where two sisters witness the suicide of their wild, beautiful mother. Their father, sick with grief, blindfolds the children to shield them from the misery of the world. Left that way for years, they are each scarred in their own way: Mara is rendered fully blind, and Aileen partly so. When a neighbour discovers their condition, they are immediately separated for treatment, and it isn’t until decades later, after Aileen’s marriage has fallen apart, that she decides to seek out her lost sister. She heads to Dawson City, Yukon, where Mara is said to be living, but instead finds Mara’s angry young son, Jason.

Soon Aileen has insinuated her way into the hard-drinking, hard-living existence of Dawson City’s residents, from whom she hears various conflicting stories about her sister. When the novel shifts to Jason’s perspective, the reader starts to understand the nature of these stories and the underlying secrets that compel their creation.

Engaging and deeply moving, In the Land of Birdfishes builds inevitably to a shocking and heartbreaking conclusion. When I had eyes, I saw my sister’s hair (yellow), my mother’s back, small rocks that the water took out and in from the shore with gasps of its deep ocean lungs. I remember my own hands, how tiny they were beside my father’s. One day he put my hands in his and showed me how they disappeared, like that, inside his fist. Both my hands: gone. I lost all this—lost everything—but slowly.

REBECCA SILVER SLAYTER’s fiction and non-fiction have appeared in such publications as The Antigonish Review, The Hart House Review, Brick, Rabble.ca, Quill & Quire and The Walrus. She has received numerous awards and scholarships, including the David McKeen Award for Best Creative Writing Thesis for In The Land Of Birdfishes. She lives in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

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“A debut novel that will have you rapt from the first page, Rebecca Silver Slater's In the Land of Birdfishes is a dark magnetic tale about twin struggles: how we love and are loved, how we long to see and be seen. Under northern summer nights, the novel illuminates the lengths we will go to protect our kin, and how, through the dull pain of circumstance, we are capable of failing each other. Spellbinding in its myths and twisting mysteries, this novel will lead you to a shoreline between truth and story where the whole foundation of your world will forever shift for having been taken in. Poignant, seductive, achingly human. Here is a new voice in fiction that will leave you changed.? “Heather Jessup, author of The Lightning Field ()