Carnival Glass, Bonnie Dunlop's new fiction collection, is an examination of the infirmity of human relationships — marriages, brotherhood, friendships, parent?child relations hindered by negligence and death — and how strange providence can send a sane and settled person entirely off the rails. These stories honour how we love and take care of each other, and how, inevitably, we fail each other too.

Dunlop's settings — dusty ranches, near?ghost towns of Southwest Saskatchewan, infinite beaches of Tofino, BC, small prairie cities in the 60s and exotic locales of contemporary Mexico” are built with a quiet grace and familiarity and remain integral to her stories. It is with such detail that the assured writing in Carnival Glass situates award?winning author Bonnie Dunlop as a contending voice for women's fiction.

Dunlop is at home in several genres — fiction, poetry and memoir. She is the author of two short story collections, The Beauty Box, winner of the Saskatchewan First Book Award (2004), and later her second collection Carnival Glass (2008) which was also nominated for a SBA. Dunlop lives under the endless skies of Swift Current Saskatchewan, but shares an affinity with the Peace River area of Alberta. As she tells it, her uncle moved to the Peace River country from Saskatchewan in the dirty thirties. Trips to the Peace River country loom large in her childhood memories although, in reality, “how many times would my entire family drive 18 hours on less than stellar roads for a visit?” When her uncle died, his roots deep in the Peace, there was a clipping in his effects titled “Raft Baby of the Peace River.” Her cousin sent her the clipping and suggested it would make a great novel. She read the clipping and set it aside for ‘’sometime later.” That sometime later is now.

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