A compelling and inventive collection about the ways we leave and the reasons we choose what to leave behind.

Framed within a tale about a journalist investigating choices of life and death, the eighteen stories in this collection explore restlessness, belonging, freedom, and mortality. A prisoner falls in love with his cellmate's fiancée and breaks out to confess his feelings. A woman journeys from Honduras to the United States in the hope of a better life. Convenience store owners attempt to free themselves from financial burden by withholding evidence to a murder. The characters in Exit Strategies are all in need of a way out, a way forward, a way through.

In Exit Strategies, it is less about the destination and more about the initial decision to leave. In this daring and inventive debut, Paul Cresey weaves narratives that are sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always utterly captivating.

Paul Cresey is a fiction writer based in Victoria, BC. He has been published in Grain, Qwerty, The Dalhousie Review, The New Orphic Review, Burning Water, and online at prairiejournal.org. He was the recipient of a Canadian Council for the Arts Grant for New/Emerging Writer in 2020 for his unpublished novel Spectral Lines. At one time a touring singer-songwriter, he was nominated for a Canadian Folk Music Award for Young Performer of the Year in 2008. His albums can be found on Spotify and Apple Music. A graduate in Education, Cresey currently works in Finance at the Royal BC Museum. Exit Strategies is his first book.

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"Cresey is fearless. His stories tread the dark, obsessive corners of lives real and imagined and never flinch from what they find. The characters in Exit Strategies are on strange, desperate paths or trapped in prisons of their own design, where truth and fiction are equally strange and absolutely compelling. A terrific debut!"

Thomas Wharton