These eight stories reveal a world that’s both recognizable and strange: cities of anxiety and violence, where quiet inhabitants lead outwardly banal lives that conceal sinister interiors. The premises, both fantastic and surreal, are also eerily plausible; they often follow the logic of dreams where the real can appear in disguise. Though geographically rooted, the setting – from Ottawa to Toronto and the South of France – take on an ephemeral dimension: the geography is of the subconscious.

With his darkly philosophical bent and sly humour, Alexis has fashioned an underworld and limned it with light. Despair quakes with life and sings with the imaginative brilliance of one of the most accomplished new talents writing today.

Andre Alexis' profile page

ANDRÉ ALEXIS is an author of novels, short stories, and plays. His 2015 novel, Fifteen Dogs, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada Reads, and the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. In 2017, he was awarded the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for fiction. His internationally acclaimed debut, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. He is also the author of Days by Moonlight, which won the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. His other works include The Hidden Keys, Pastoral, Asylum, and Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa. Alexis lives in Toronto.

“Readers will be rewarded by this collection’s extraordinary depth of field and by its author’s vibrant intelligence.”
—Branko Gorjup, Review of Candian Fiction

“Alexis is among those whose talent could take him anywhere.”
—Canadian Forum

“He has a bizarre and brilliant wit.”
—Ottawa Xpress

“His stories are powerful, disturbing, and beautiful.”
—Harry Mathews