An exquisitely written collection of stories about religion, the mysteries and messiness of humanity, and evangelical culture.

In seven stories, End Times explores the lives of people variously entangled with evangelical culture, excavating their hidden longings and desires.

A Vancouver mother convinces her opioid-addicted son to attend church, and sparks her own personal emergency. A jet-setting consultant pressures a rural fundamentalist teen to get an abortion, while her own secular life unravels. An atheist doctor tries to expose a megachurch pastor as a closeted hypocrite. Michelle Syba's characters are richly realized, often surprising themselves along the way.

During a time when crises abound and the end seems near, End Times invites us to reimagine the complex, utterly human lives of both believers and nonbelievers. This exquisite collection takes us into the heart of the divine and the human.

Michelle Syba's profile page

Michelle Syba was born in Toronto and grew up Pentecostal. In university, she left the faith and became a zealot for literature, completing a PhD in English from Harvard. Her work has been published in The New Quarterly, Image, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and elsewhere. She lives in Montreal.

"Michelle Syba extends to her characters an extraordinary grace. Though the pen feels secular, Syba's meditations on faith are suffused with mystery. They carve a space between certainty and humility, where orthodoxies secular and sacred are laid bare. And, when we least expect it, they burst into moments of revelation." - Emer O'Toole, author of Girls Will Be Girls