Winner of the 2018 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award

Maine, 1980. A utopian community is on the verge of collapse. The charismatic leader’s authority teeters as his followers come to realize they've been exploited for too long. To make matters worse, the eleven-year-old son of one adherent learns that his mother has cancer.

Taking refuge in his imagination, the boy begins to speak of another time and place. His parents believe he is remembering his own life before birth. This memory, a story within the story of Blood Fable, is an epic tale about the search for a lost city refracted through the lens of the adventures the boy loves to read. But strangely, as the world around them falls apart, he and his parents find that his story seems to foretell the events unfolding in their present lives.

Ois&iaccute;n Curran grew up in rural Maine. He received a BA in Classics and an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University (where he was the recipient of a national scholarship and a writing fellowship), and a diploma in Translation (French to English) from Concordia University. He is the author of Mopus (2008), and was named a "Writer to Watch" by CBC: Canada Writes. Curran lives in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, with his wife and two children.

Oisín Curran's profile page

• Winner, Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award