An embittered writer flees contemporary Canada for Spain’s Costa del Sol, intending to craft a final, career-rescuing fiction. A prison inmate serving a life sentence in fin de siècle British Columbia accepts a transfer to a leper colony in the Juan de Fuca Strait. This parallel narrative, says one reader, is “a word stew that stirs violence and cruelty, yet bubbles with equal measures of empathy and tenderness. It has the added advantage of being darkly comedic.” Said another, “There’s Huckleberry Finn adventure in these pages, a shitload of surprises, and enough bodies to populate a graveyard. It’s proudly profane, deliciously blasphemous, and may disturb some readers.” Cropped to a pitch, Dire Straits is a redemption story about a man navigating hopeless circumstances and the troubled soul who imagines him.

Vancouver writer Don McLellan has worked as a journalist in Canada, South Korea, and Hong Kong. His fiction has been nominated, listed, a finalist, and honourably mentioned for awards in Canada, the US, and the UK.