This collection of stories charts the emotional lives of characters in the midst of private sorrows and triumphs. Each story, set in the cities and towns around the Great Lakes, reveals the author’s fierce love for a landscape merciless and opulent, yet speaks with eloquence about its inhabitants. The humanitarian crisis in Thunder Bay is seen from the perspective of a police officer whose stepson is missing; fearing he will be found, like so many others, in the McIntyre River, his mother’s grief causes an insurmountable rift. Crumbling buildings, high rent and condo developments in Toronto are playfully satirized. A young mother waits inside a Chicago-area prison to find out if funding for the Prison-Mother Baby program will continue. A man drives from Traverse City, Michigan in the midst of a lake effect storm to transport his Iranian-Canadian girlfriend across the border illegally. A Canadian mother befriends an American woman, employed at Target, whose desperation for a baby leads her to seek the advice of spiritualists in Lily Dale, New York. Topical and arresting, these tales showcase an author who writes with insight and sensitivity.

Dayle Furlong is the author of the novel Saltwater Cowboys, a 2015 Toronto Public Library Dewey Diva Pick, and a collection of poetry entitled Open Slowly. Her short-fiction has appeared in The Great Lakes Review, The Puritan and The Saturday Evening Post. Her fiction has been awarded an Award of Merit from the Summer Literary Seminars international literary competition and was a finalist for the 2018 Curt Johnson Memorial Prose Award in the USA. She is a graduate of the Humber College School for Writers and has a Masters of Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

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“Stylish, daring and dramatic . . . Annie Proulx meets Alice Munro with a bit of Harry Crews thrown in.”

Alan Warner, author of <i>The Stars in the Bright Sky</i>