A slow-burning story exploring the generational effects of repression and transgression, set against the raw, eerie landscape of the badlands

Regina is a socially awkward loner who is content to live a life withdrawn from everyone except her cherished pet bunny. But after seven years of silence, Regina's brother, Ricky, shows up unannounced on her doorstep, along with his daughter, Jez - a peculiar six-year-old with an unnerving vicious streak - upending Regina's quiet life.

It's clear to Regina that something terrible has happened, though the truth won't come to the surface easily. After all, Regina and Ricky lived a childhood fraught with secrets buried as deep as the fossils in the desolate landscape around them. But this secret is one that cannot stay buried for long, and its exposure sets off a calamitous journey through the plains and mountains of Alberta's badlands to the coast of BC, forcing Regina to confront the brutality of family love and to question how far she is willing to go to preserve it.

By turns thrilling and heartwarming, rife with gothic tension, and carried by fervent compassion, Bad Land is a story about the toxic nature of guilt, the fragility of memory, and the ways we shape our own versions of the truth in order to survive.

Corinna Chong's short fiction has appeared in magazines including Grain, Room, and Riddle Fence. She won the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize for "Kids in Kindergarten." Corinna's first novel, Belinda's Rings, was published in 2013, and her first story collection, The Whole Animal, was published in 2023. Her novel Bad Land will publish in the fall of 2024. She lives in Kelowna, BC, where she is an English and Fine Arts Professor at Okanagan College.

Corinna Chong's profile page

With compassion and keen perception, Bad Land explores the bodies we inhabit, the blood that connects us, and the bones in the ground under our feet. Corinna Chong is an unforgettable writer, and this is a stunning, deeply unnerving book. -Julia Phillips, author of Bear and Disappearing Earth

Bad Land is a masterpiece about family, how it rips us apart and also tethers us forever, for better or worse. Chong shows how some loves are unequivocal and indelible, as though they are cast in stone. This novel is surprising at every turn - touching, unsparing, saturated with truth about love and abandonment. All those damaging, enduring human entanglements, old as the dinosaurs. Chong's narrator, Regina, has the pull of a planet. I love every sentence here; I love this novel. -Lisa Moore, author of This Is How We Love

Bad Land is a marvel - original and unforgettable. Chong's voice echoes beyond the last page. -Linda Spalding, author of The Purchase

A powerful and disturbing exploration of kinship and obligation - a riveting literary journey I'll never forget. -Suzette Mayr, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of The Sleeping Car Porter