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Fiction Literary

Post

by (author) Arley McNeney

Publisher
Thistledown Press
Initial publish date
Apr 2007
Category
Literary
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781897235287
    Publish Date
    Apr 2007
    List Price
    $19.95

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Description

Nolan Taylor must confront her life after basketball, and discover what it takes to endure the physical and emotional pain in rebuilding her self-awareness.

Nolan Taylor is a thirteen-year veteran of the Canadian women's wheelchair basketball team. Her position as "Big Girl" on the team belies her fragility when her decision to retire and undergo a long overdue hip replacement throws her into a post-retirement identity crisis. Spurred on by pain and a numbing domesticity with longtime love, Quinn McLeod, she retreats into her memory, reliving her rookie year and emerging sexuality with her much older mentor, Darren Steward. As Nolan struggles to maintain her tenuous connections to the people around her in the midst of physical anguish, we are reminded that, despite our bodies' limitations, we have physical needs that we are driven to fulfill, and the adrenaline that pushes professional athletes can be harnessed to allow what may seem impossible.

About the author

Arley McNeney's first novel, Post, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, Best First Novel, Canadian and the Caribbean, and longlisted for the Saskatchewan Best First Novel and for the ReLit awards. An elite athlete, McNeney played on Canada's national wheelchair basketball team from 2001 to 2007, winning two World Championships and a bronze medal at the 2004 Paralympics.

Arley McNeney's profile page

Excerpt: Post (by (author) Arley McNeney)

"Finally," I told my doctor when he gave me the booklet, "an instruction manual to my body. Why didn't I get one of these thirty-two bloody years ago?"

The book has stern warnings not to engage in any high-risk tango or salsa dancing. Lawn bowling: yes. Intercourse that involves "unnecessary bending over": no. ("What exactly constitutes 'unnecessary?'"Quinn asked.)

It was natural to see my hip as a bawdy house: skin like heavy curtains over the secret creaking of joints. My hip with its red-light-district throb of inflammation when I walk, heartbeat misplaced there. My heart not in the right place, too close to the groin.

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