Daphne Baird impulsively leaves behind her boyfriend, her family, her whole life, for a new start in Montreal. Losing herself in the rhythmic roar of a copy shop by day, and haunting the sweltering, vibrant streets of the city by night, she collects fragments of histories and reconstructs other peoples' lives. Her long-postponed search for her biological parents leads her to the diaries of her grandfather, opening a window on 1960 British Guiana. As Daphne descends into the paranoid yet lucid world of Gerald Eyre - which reveals more than Daphne could ever expect - she cannot avoid the tensions swirling around the city or her own desire for family and connection. Out of My Skin explores the things that bind us to places and people. It is a powerful tale of voyeurism, crisis, race, and family secrets that in its layering of contemporary events and personal histories subtly explores the effects and aftershocks of colonialism in the New World.

Tessa McWatt is an acclaimed author whose work includes novels for adults and young people. Her fiction has been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the City of Toronto Book Awards and the OCM Bocas Prize. Most recently, she published the novel Higher Ed and co-edited Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada with Rabindranath Maharj and Dionne Brand. She is the author of the forthcoming Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging, an analysis of the race debate from a personal perspective. She is also a librettist and professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Where Are You, Agnes? is her first picture book.

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