If you could take just one thing back… Every Little Thing explores how lives are shaped by the butterfly effect of decisions that go desperately wrong. After a shocking family tragedy, Cohen Davies feels isolated, guilty, and numb to everything except the allure of his new neighbor, Allie Crosbie. She’s a free spirit, and he sees in her the perfect place to bury his troubles. But when Allie’s father asks an unfathomable favour, Cohen’s decision to help him sets off a chain reaction of irrevocable events that leave one man dead, one man assaulted, and Cohen incarcerated. In the aftermath, Allie will reveal a shocking secret of her own. With his award-winning debut, Away From Everywhere, Chad Pelley showed us his verve as a novelist; Every Little Thing shows us the flipside of love, and Pelley cuts no corners in exposing how a secret kept to protect love can just as easily destroy a life.

Chad Pelley’s fiction has been recognized by more than a dozen literary awards. His debut novel, Away from Everywhere, was a Coles bestseller, won the NLAC’s CBC Emerging Artist award, and was shortlisted for both the ReLit and CAA Emerging Writer awards, and a film adaptation starring Jason Priestley and Shawn Doyle was filmed in 2015. His second novel, Every Little Thing, was shortlisted for the ReLit Award, and Canada Reads winner Lisa Moore called it “Stylistically fresh and can’t-put-it-down compelling.” He has appeared alongside acclaimed authors at festivals such as IFOA,Vancouver Writers’ Festival, and Writers at Woody Point. His short fiction has won several awards, and has been published in anthologies, textbooks, and journals. He’s taught creative writing at Memorial University, founded Salty Ink.com, and has written for Quill & Quire, The National Post, Globe and Mail, the Telegraph-Journal, and Atlantic Books Today. He is currently the founding editor of The Overcast: Newfoundland’s Alternative Newspaper.

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• Short-listed, The Relit Award

Every Little Thing’s protagonist, Cohen Davies, is as psychologically rich and prismatic a character as any reader could hope for – here is complicated love, human failing, tenacity and true feeling. Chad Pelley takes on addling jealousy, heartache, loss, and the need to be forgiven. Stylistically fresh, taut with emotional torques and charges, Pelley’s Every Little Thing is can't-put-it-down compelling.

- Lisa Moore, author of February and Alligator

From the cold clutch of a prison cell to the serenity of a lover’s arms and back again, this is the tale of a man whose pugnacious heart is both literally and figuratively broken. In Every Little Thing Chad Pelley delivers a transfixing chronicle of what happens when devotion and jealousy ride alongside a clumsy desire for a just world. Compulsively readable from start to finish.

Billie Livingston, author of One Good Hustle and Cease to Blush