A sexy, unforgettable story about love and longing in a time of chaos by Scotiabank Giller Prize–longlisted author Eva Crocker.

Back in the Land of the Living brings us a year in the life of Marcy, a young queer woman who moves to Montreal in the fall of 2019 after making a mess of her life in St. John’s. Alone in a big city on the brink of lockdown, Marcy finds herself working an assortment of odd and sometimes dangerous, sometimes ethically questionable jobs, and swept up in a tumultuous romance with a charismatic woman. As friends, loyalties, and philosophies collide, Marcy tries to carve out a future amidst the intertwined crises of late capitalism, the climate apocalypse, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

With all the candour, wit, and bracing wisdom that have won her accolades and awards across Canada, Eva Crocker gives us a sexy, unforgettable story about love and longing in a time of chaos.

Eva Crocker is the Associate Editor & Chief Staff Writer at the Overcast, an arts and culture paper in St. John’s. Her work has been published in Riddle Fence, the Newfoundland Quarterly, WORD Quarterly and the Telegram's Cuffer Anthology. Her short story collection Barrelling Forward was shortlisted for the NLCU Fresh Fish Award and the Dane Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers. She has a master’s degree in English literature from Memorial University where she received the 2015 Medal For Excellence in Graduate Studies.

Eva Crocker's profile page

In part, Back in the Land of the Living is a story about a girl trying to make it in the big city, but within this frame, Crocker also adds another voice to the canon of queer literature about intimate partner abuse, following in the footsteps of Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House and Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other.

Montreal Review of Books

Crocker rewrites the everyday experiences into the literary experience … It is a risky endeavour, referring to the pandemic, when even the mere utterance of the word; pandemic, invokes a superstitious sense of terror … Yet Crocker manages to spotlight this tumultuous time in the not-so-distant past when things seemed to be at a tipping point.”

Montreal Guardian

Crocker’s prose is masterful.

Maisonneuve

Crocker shows that our ways of connecting to one another were already fractured … Perhaps we are only now learning how to really live with each other.

Toronto Star