Growing up stories have always been a popular genre in Canadian literature, and now the canon is about to welcome a stellar new arrival in Mary Borsky, author of the newly published short story collection Influence of the Moon. Although fictional, the twelve surely crafted stories in Influence of the Moon resonate with the immediacy of memoir, so genuine are the emotions and the world they capture, so subtle the mood and the times they evoke.

Irene Lychenko is a young Ukrainian-Canadian girl coming of age in the northern Alberta town of Salt Prairie. The stories chronicle her growing awareness of the rifts in her family and in her community as she struggles to find her own identity in a world whose smallness is at once comforting and stifling, familiar yet tinged with a strangeness that hints of another, larger world beyond.

Mary Borsky has published stories in several magazines, including Quarry, NeWest Review, Geist, The Queen's Quarterly and Grain. Her work has been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories `93, The Journey Prize Anthology and The Third Macmillan Anthology. Influence of the Moon is her first book, which she describes as `very autobiographical and not at all biographical. Real life is more boring and less believable than fiction.` Mary Borsky lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

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