Cluck is a darkly comic novel about Henry, an only child whose mother has bipolar disorder. As a teen, Henry becomes a radio junkie lost in the world of music. As a young man, he becomes obsessed with a female DJ whose evening show mysteriously beams out of Idaho and into his car while he’s driving over Vancouver’s Lions Gate Bridge. Henry has to live his life in the shadow cast by his mother, but he never completely gives up hope that he can find his place. Slowly, when he’s in his thirties, his life starts to open in positive directions, including sporadic success with chicken farming, outsider art (he calls himself a knit reactor), and romance. But, it’s not until Henry is in his fifties that his character is finally defined, but not without one final struggle with his own quirkiness.

Lenore Rowntree lives beside the heron rookery in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. She is excited Thistledown Press will publish her novel Cluck in 2016. Her short stories and poetry have appeared in several publications including Geist, Room Magazine, The New Quarterly, Other Voices, Exile Quarterly, The Tyee, Poet to Poet Anthology (Guernica Editions 2012), and The Best Canadian Poetry Anthology (Tightrope Books 2010). Her self-illustrated book of children’s poems Love Letters received a gold medal from the Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards in 2007. Her play The Woods at Tender Creek was produced at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre (The Cultch) in 2010. She is a co-editor and contributor to the anthology of life stories Hidden Lives: Coming Out on Mental Illness (Brindle&Glass 2012), and most recently her collection of short stories Dovetail Joint was published in 2015 by Quadra Books.

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