Shortlisted for the Ottawa Book Award for Fiction

"As a potential heir to the tradition of Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro, McInnis is off to a promising start." - Publishers Weekly

An affair that begins in an apothecary's garden brings Joyce to a hospice, where she tends to the dying alongside her own grief. A middle-aged woman recalls the lovable, lavable secret of the first night spent on her husband's farm. A mother and daughter discuss suicide while hiking a shipwreck survivor'strail.

In Nadine McInnis's sophomore collection, boozers repent, gamblers reform, cheaters suffer, the deaf speak volumes, and cancer patients string flowers in their hair. Probing and compassionate, executed with a steady hand, Blood Secrets is an excavation of endings and their revelations: the affair that ends a marriage, the disease that ends a life, the effect of a long-ago suicide. And as her characters struggle to administer to each other in their final moments, each story becomes an autopsy, dissecting bodies for their secrets and daily life for the things it hides.

McInnis is the author of six other books, including Quicksilver (short stories), Hand to Hand (poetry), and Poetics of Desire: Essays on Dorothy Livesay. Her work has appeared in a variety of journals, including The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, Event, and Room of Oneâ??s Own. She lives in Ottawa where she teaches in the Professional Writing Program at Algonquin College.

Nadine McInnis' profile page

"Blood Secrets ... is dealing with some powerful subjects," writes the Citizen: "she was with both her parents when they died, and the last two stories in the book are very much about that experience. She has also volunteered in a hospice." - Ottawa Citizen

"[With] lean and lyrical language...and arresting imagesBlood Secrets is a deceptively gentle book, a desperately tender succession of tales that bruise the heart with their sadness, while at the same time offering the salve of kindness".Literary Review of Canada