The protagonists in this eight-story offering are floundering and out of options. A tempest approaches, a reckoning overdue. They include a reform school incorrigible; a small-town newspaper editor in the dying days of print; a young backpacker finding kinship and renewal on a tropical isle; a Second World War veteran and the girl he can’t forget; a South Asian immigrant’s side hustle; mature women, husbands gone and kids scattered, and a support group like no other; a rejected novelist confronting an embittered publisher; and, in the final yarn, the collection’s caboose, three friends on a road trip to Mexico, and the mysterious hitchhiker who tags along.

“(These stories), told mostly in the breathless present tense, focus with a tender and disarmingly gentle eye on characters who have seemingly run out of road. They ask us, again and again, what it means to live life fully, to choose when all choices seem wrong. In a collection that dives… into the motivations behind actions that sometimes seem incomprehensible, the author gives us a deeply meaningful way to get lost.”

Ryan Frawley

British Columbia Review

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