“Anthropologist of the absurd” and “brave iconoclast,” M.A.C. Farrant positively bristles in this three-part novel-length work of prose fragments, snippets, questions, speculations, and meditations, by turns philosophical, dark, comedic, and lyrical in its attempts to imagine a multitude of possible futures for our accelerated age. It offers her readers nothing less than The Strange Truth About Us.

M.A.C. Farrant is the acclaimed author of nine previous collections of satirical and humourous short fiction, and two works of non-fiction. Her work is infused with acerbic wit and innovation, and her surrealistic visions of everyday life are startlingly precise.

M.A.C. Farrant has been writing and publishing since the 1980s: Nineteen works of fiction, non-fiction and memoir; two produced plays, countless book reviews for the Vancouver Sun and Toronto Globe & Mail; and over a dozen chapbooks. Along with Pauline Holdstock, she ran the Sidney Reading Series from 1994–2009.Her books have been finalists for many awards, among them the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, the Ethel Wilson fiction prize, two Jessie Richardson theatre awards, The Van City Book Prize, the National Magazine Awards, the ReLit Award, the Gemini Awards for the Bravo short film adaptation of her story, Rob’s Guns & Ammo, and the Victoria Book Prize (three times), the last of which she won in 2014 for her collection of miniature fiction, The World Afloat. The Strange Truth About Us was one of the Globe & Mail’s Best Fiction books of 2012.Her 2021 non-fiction book, One Good Thing, was a BC Bestseller. Jigsaw: A Puzzle in Ninety-Three Pieces, another non-fiction book, was released in 2023. In 2024, Talon Books will issue the expanded 20th Anniversary Edition of her memoir, My Turquoise Years.Her most recent chapbooks are Some of the Puzzles (2021) and The Literary Cow Festival (2024) both from above/ground press in Ottawa. Talonbooks is the publisher of her last ten books.Farrant is well-known for her acerbic wit and laugh-out-loud humour. BC Bookworld has called her “Canada’s most acerbic and intelligent humourist”. Bill Richardson has called her “a master of the Zen-like art of delivering weight in a way that is featherlight” further noting that she’s “the most accomplished and unapologetic miniaturist in Canadian letters.”

M.A.C. Farrant's profile page

• One of the Top Twenty-Three Canadian Fiction Books (Globe and Mail)

“Farrant pulls you into the absence, scrapes you around the side of it, and spits you back out, confused and satisfied. … her prose tends to be acerbic and funny, a little jarring, and her stories are constructed to resonate with the reader long after the book is done. The Strange Truth About Us left me feeling unsettled and slightly anxious, but in a way that felt necessary. It is well worth the read.”
– Herizons

“The Strange Truth About Us is shot through with Farrant’s subversive wit, her acute sense of irony, As well as being poetic and thought-provoking, it is quite funny.”
– Victoria Times Colonist

“The Strange Truth About Us is impossible to summarize, save to say that it is both an acknowledgment of and an antidote to all the uncertainty we must shoulder in this, our age of anxiety and absence. Delightful and disturbing in all the best ways, this book addresses that which mostly remains unspoken in ways that have seldom been spoken before.”
– Globe and Mail

“One thing is sure: the format invites – if not demands – us to dip into the book again and again for insights that are funny, timely, provocative and unsettling.”
– Prairie Fire Review of Books

“a novel, a memoir, a prose poem, a reading list, a note book, a book of quotations, a manifesto. It’s a work of intellectual speculation on what the world is going to look like in a few years. … experimental, brave, daring, unusual, brilliant.”
– J.S. Porter