Winner of the Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction and the CAA Emerging Writer Award, Barrelling Forward is a brilliantly crafted debut collection from one contemporary fiction’s newest literary star.

Eva Crocker sees life in sharper focus than the rest of us. The objects, rituals, and scenes of everyday life take on an almost mythic quality in these stories, even while remaining intimately recognizable to us all. Crocker peers at the underbelly of poverty and work, ambition and apathy, loneliness and love, to find the sliver of beauty in each spot. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems: the boundaries between friendship and sex dissolve; power relationships are turned on their heads, if only long enough to examine them from all angles; transgressions and escapes become new kinds of traps. In “Auditioning,” a young twin makes a desperate attempt to reclaim her individuality. In “Serving,” a father and a son give parallel accounts of what it looks like when you let life eat you from the inside out. In “Star of the Sea,” a man watches his past get literally torn down before his eyes. And in the Cuffer Prize-winning “Dead Skin,” an after-school walk through the barrens leaves two boys forever changed.

In stories that ache with longing even as they pulse with new possibilities, Crocker gives us an unforgettable array of ordinary people, sometimes soaring, sometimes sinking, but always, ultimately, barrelling forward towards what’s next.

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

Barrelling Forward, is a short-story collection unique for its diverse points of view … Crocker draws us in immediately … these brief pieces resonate with the reader for a long time.

Winnipeg Free Press

A fine and enthralling collection that will excite and seduce readers.

Toronto Star

Suggesting Alice Munro is both high and lazy praise – an easy way to say well-set short fiction and a pretty future for Crocker in CanLit – but there’s a quality to this Newfoundland author’s work that fans of the Nobel Prize winner will recognize, if they’re willing to displace age, place and decoration accordingly. Where Munro so remarkably captures rural banality, Crocker taps a similarly enthralling mundanity in Quebec’s urban bustle and Eastern Canada’s could-be-anywhere suburban sprawls.

National Post

[A]n intimate and fascinating read.

This Magazine