From award-winning writer Jann Everard, a debut short story collection about love and loss.

Some of the women in Blue Runaways are grieving. Some are looking for a second chance. All are at a turning point. From Iceland to Bali, from the comfortable houses of Canada’s cities to its wild and expansive backcountry, the characters in this collection face the most human of fears: that dear ones die, love is a risk, and no promise is certain.

As diverse in situation as it is controlled in theme, this collection serves as a multifaceted exploration of loss, love, and what it takes to move on. With a keen eye for landscape and an uncanny knack for inhabiting hearts and minds, Everard ventures into her character’s darkest days. By confronting the sorrow of being alive, Blue Runaways reveals the joy of knowing we are not alone.

Jann Everard is an award-winning writer whose stories have been published in Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand in journals including: The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, Grain, The Humber Literary Review, EVENT Magazine, Room Magazine, and The Dalhousie Review. Born in Halifax, Jann settled in Toronto, where she worked in health administration and raised two sons. A life-long traveller and outdoorswoman, she now makes her home on Vancouver Island, hiking, kayaking, writing, and being inspired by nature.

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Praise for Blue Runaways:

“Iceland, Vietnam, Bali, Italy—Jann Everard’s vividly-drawn characters may travel far from home, but cannot avoid a reckoning with the fundamentals of life, including death. Blue Runaways is a thought-provoking and bittersweet collection, well worth the read.”
—Kathy Page, author of Paradise and Elsewhere and Dear Evelyn

“Each of the stories in Blue Runaways is a gorgeous slice of time and place, filled with characters who struggle with connection and disconnection, passion and compassion, love and its absence. Jann Everard writes with an eye for detail and with lots of heart. Her bang-on observations, delivered with empathy, make these stories a delight.”
—Lori Hahnel, author of Vermin: Stories and Flicker

“Jann’s stories travel the world: from Iceland to Bali; from the grasslands of the Canadian prairies to Italy; and more. As skilled as she is at evoking these disparate places, she is equally skilled at travelling the inner human landscape. I have ridden right along with Jann’s heroines as they grapple with life’s big questions and emotions, and have come away feeling enriched. I loved these stories.”
—Lynn Thomson, author of Birding with Yeats

“With compassion and sparkling wit, these stories deftly explore the unexpected confluence of loss and desire. Everard has a painter’s eye for landscapes—both foreign and familiar—and a storyteller’s skill in communicating how the natural world shapes our humanity. Read them slowly, and savour them.”
—Carleigh Baker, author of Bad Endings and finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize

“Blue Runaways is very outdoorsy, with characters in canoes and snowshoes, spelunking in Iceland and touring Bali, but Everard also communes with wine and divorce, human loss and mysterious adaptations, sketching vibrant scenes and scapes with amazing empathy. Blue Runaways is meditative, cathartic, and brimming with life; it sings.”
—Mark Anthony Jarman, author of Burn Man: Selected Stories and the travel book Touch Anywhere to Begin

“I had the pleasure of working with Jann Everard on early versions of these stories and was impressed from the start by her confidence, her curiosity, her compassion, and her keen insight into the secrets we keep even from ourselves. The women in these pages are indeed “blue runaways,” trying to escape the uncomfortable truth that they—and those they love—are mortal, and that it is impossible for people to protect each other. Exploring how they come to this realization and how they respond to it, Everard is at once unsparing and deeply kind.
“But in addition to the ‘blue’ element that human life swims in, there is another world: the natural world in which people seek, and sometimes find, refuge. Reading these stories is a wide-eyed visit not just to the icy challenge of winter camping in Ontario and the dry heat of summer camping in Saskatchewan but also to an Italian garden, a Bali redolent of rambutans and jasmine, and an Icelandic cave full of phosphorescent algae. Everard maps the non-human world as expertly as she does the mind’s divagations and the body’s appetites.”
—Susan Glickman, author of Cathedral/Grove and sixteen other books of poetry and prose