It’s 1965. Twenty-two-year-old Linda Wise despairs of escaping her overprotective parents and her hometown, where far too many know she was sexually assaulted as a teenager. Deliverance arrives in the form of marriage to the charismatic, twenty-six-year-old Ronald Brunson, a newly ordained Methodist minister who ignites her passion for social justice. Ron tells her war and racial discrimination are symptoms of the “moral rot” destroying the country, conjuring up something dark and rancid in her mind, thrilling in its wickedness. He sweeps her away from New Jersey to serve with him at a church in a speck-on-the-map prairie town in Minnesota. What lies ahead for her over the next seven years is the subject of Tricia Dower’s penetrating study of a marriage and a woman’s evolving sense of self as she confronts the fear that keeps her from erupting into her future, unfettered self. BECOMING LIN conjures the turbulent era of Freedom Riders for civil rights, Vietnam war resistance, the US government’s war against the resisters, sisterhood and the push for equal rights for women, new-age metaphysics, motivational psychology and the unravelling of the traditional marriage contract—an era that resonates in today’s persistent racism and sexism, perpetual war and wide-reaching government surveillance.

Tricia Dower was a business executive before reinventing herself in 2002. She thought writing fiction would be easier than feeding hungry shareholders. She was wrong. But in 2008, the feminist press Inanna published her first book, Silent Girl, a collection of stories inspired by Shakespeare. It was nominated for the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature. In 2012 Penguin Canada published her debut novel, Stony River, which was shortlisted for the Canadian Authors Association Award for Fiction, and in 2016 Caitlin Press published her second novel, Becoming Lin, about which the Vancouver Sun writes, “Some of the most powerful and eloquent Canadian novelists of the 20th and 21st century…including Margaret Atwood, Margaret Lawrence and Ethel Wilson…open up what had been cloaked in silence, the oppression of women and their self-discoveries in resistance. We can now add to this important liberation canon the name of Tricia Dower.”  Dower won first prize for fiction in The Malahat Review’s 2010 Open Season Awards and first prize for creative non-fiction in subTerrain Magazine’s 2015 Lush Triumphant literary awards. A dual citizen of Canada and the United States, Tricia lives and writes in Brentwood Bay, BC.

Tricia Dower's profile page

• Short-listed, City of Victoria Butler Prize