In this finely honed collection of short fiction, Dwayne Brenna creates a series of unforgettable characters-academics, street people, ageing hippies, farmers, music producers, videogame players and their mothers, movie stars, boxers, actors, cooks, and even a parrot-and , with compassion and affection (and sometimes laugh-out-loud humour) tests their mettle in a variety of fascinating locations, from Saskatoon to Victoria to Libya to Los Angeles to London to Hawaii and beyond with familiar and homey details and a fidelity to mood and atmosphere.

Along the way, Brenna tackles a wide selection of conflicts and social ills, good versus evil, scruples and the lack of them, doing or not doing the "right thing," yielding or not yielding to temptations, and the many other struggles of the human heart, all without being didactic or preachy, but simply by addressing the very human circumstances his characters find themselves in, and how they manage to escape, or not escape, the predicaments arising because of who they are, who they've been, and who they could be.

Dwayne Brenna is the award-winning author of several books of humour, poetry, and fiction. Coteau Books published his popular series of humorous vignettes entitled Eddie Gustafson's Guide to Christmas in 2000. His two books of poetry, Stealing Home and Give My Love to Rose, were published by Hagios Press in 2012 and 2015 respectively. Stealing Home, a poetic celebration of the game of baseball, was subsequently shortlisted for several Saskatchewan Book Awards, including the University of Regina Book of the Year Award. His first novel, New Albion, about a laudanum-addicted playwright struggling to survive in London's East End during the winter of 1850-51, was published by Coteau Books in autumn 2016. New Albion won the 2017 Muslims for Peace and Justice Fiction Award at the Saskatchewan Book Awards. It was also one of three English-language novels shortlisted for the prestigious MM Bennetts Award for historical fiction. His baseball novel Long Way Home was published by Pocol Press in 2022, and his theatre history text Nights That Shook the Stage (McFarland Books) came out in the spring of 2023. His short stories and poems have been published in an array of journals, including Grain, Nine, Spitball, The Antigonish Review, Intima, and The Cold Mountain Review.

Dwayne Brenna's profile page