Silent Girl explores the experiences of unforgettable characters as they follow trajectories unimagined by Shakespeare, including a young girl who is unwittingly sold to traffickers after losing her mother in the 2004 tsunami in the title story; an ambitious, proud student in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan who finds her dreams taken hostage in Kesh Kumay; a young woman in an interracial marriage who devises a desperate plan to help her tortured husband after his return from Vietnam in Nobody; I Myself; two women and an older man who discover how fluid the boundaries of gender can be in Cocktails With Charles; a woman who constructs a life on remembered pain after her husband disappears with their baby daughter in Deep Dark Waves; a mother and son who wrestle for control of their Alberta farm in Passing Through; an eleven-year-old girl who stumbles across incest and her own emerging sexuality in Not Meant To Know; and a genetically-rare people who struggle with shifting gender politics and an environmentally ravaged world in The Snow People, 30-46 AGM.

Tricia Dower was a business executive before reinventing herself in 2002. She thought writing fiction would be easier than feeding hungry shareholders. She was wrong. But in 2008, the feminist press Inanna published her first book, Silent Girl, a collection of stories inspired by Shakespeare. It was nominated for the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature. In 2012 Penguin Canada published her debut novel, Stony River, which was shortlisted for the Canadian Authors Association Award for Fiction, and in 2016 Caitlin Press published her second novel, Becoming Lin, about which the Vancouver Sun writes, “Some of the most powerful and eloquent Canadian novelists of the 20th and 21st century…including Margaret Atwood, Margaret Lawrence and Ethel Wilson…open up what had been cloaked in silence, the oppression of women and their self-discoveries in resistance. We can now add to this important liberation canon the name of Tricia Dower.”  Dower won first prize for fiction in The Malahat Review’s 2010 Open Season Awards and first prize for creative non-fiction in subTerrain Magazine’s 2015 Lush Triumphant literary awards. A dual citizen of Canada and the United States, Tricia lives and writes in Brentwood Bay, BC.

Tricia Dower's profile page

• Winner, IPPY Silver Medal Award for Literary Fiction
• Winner, Frank O'Connor Int'l Short Story Award

Hamlet's Gertrude. The Taming of the Shrew's Katherina. Othello's Desdemona. The trials and tribulations of Shakespeare's immortal muses provide the narrative thread that weaves together a collection of eight short stories by Tricia Dower. The timeless nature of the Bard's female protagonists blends seamlessly into the contemporary feel of Silent Girl.It is a modern masterpiece. Inanna Publications and Education, Inc. is to be commended for promoting the work of such a gifted writer. Overall, this collection is a tour de force from an author employing Shakespearean characters as a springboard for illustrating the condition of modern women.