A soldier's wife struggles to reconnect with her daughter after her husband is killed overseas. A prostitute refuses the help of the enigmatic and evangelical Jared. A heart attack survivor perplexes his family with his newfound religious euphoria. Character-driven, exploring grief and insularity, Colette Maitland''s short fiction debut shows us the price of keeping the peace in small-town America.

Profoundly Canadian, these residents of Tim Horton's Nation struggle with illness, deathand depression and hang on as best they can with true grit. Raymond Carver meets Norman Levine on these pages, which herald the appearance of a fine new writer of everyday realism. - Antanas Sileika

If Colette Maitland were a musician, you'd say she had perfect pitch...She writes with enormous empathy about characters whose lives have gone wrong. These stories push us to acknowledge the many flaws and faults that hamper human beings in the search for happiness...and then they push us further,into the realm of understanding, compassion, and forgiveness. - Isabel Huggan

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"Taken together, [Maitland's] sketches of fractured blue-collar homes form something unexpected: a portrait of a community...subtly rendered, with characters weaving in and out of each other's stories almost imperceptibly." - Quill & Quire

Straightforward realism with a touch of knowing humor. - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Small-town Ontario is a ripe setting for short fiction because, like a good short story, there is a lot going on in a tiny space.The landscape is layered andcomplicated. In Keeping the Peace, Maitland plays with the texture of everydayness. She sensitively and skillfully explores what's left unsaid to keep the façade intact." - The Telegraph-Journal

"Well rendered, with a wise array of lifelike characters facing moments of personal compromise." - The Globe & Mail

"Yeats said that a poem 'comes right with a click like a closing box' [and] the metaphor extrapolates well to short fiction endings ... More often than not, Maitland nails thiselusive 'click' ... a fine execution." - Malahat Review