Sonja Danychuk, a serious and introverted student, takes pride in her intellect and academic achievements—essential skills when growing up in a dirt-poor family that struggles to survive in a small town. When her father is cut down by a fatal heart attack, Sonja must find a way to pay for college while also supporting her financially strained mother. She agrees to tutor Carl Helbig, her high school’s hockey star and NHL hopeful, despite her strong aversion to his jock-like persona and what she perceives to be his intellectual inferiority.

Carl graduates and embarks on a wildly successful career in the NHL, but he soon finds himself in the brain trauma unit after sustaining concussions on the ice. He and Sonja are once again drawn together, eventually hurtling towards a tragedy that neither of them can outmaneuver.

Skating swiftly between tender and tense, Sonja & Carl is a surprising and heartrending love story that exposes the dark side of professional hockey.

Suzanne Hillier was born in St. John's, NF., before Confederation with Canada, and before the start of WWII. She graduated from McGill University with a BA in social sciences and attended graduate school in Columbia University in New York. She married and moved to Toronto, where she obtained a teaching certificate, an MA in literature from the University of Toronto, and where she also taught for several years. She started law school in 1968 and graduated in 1972, the year of her husband's death. She opened her own law practice in 1974, retired in 2005, and started writing. Her fiction has been published in various North American periodicals. Sonja & Carl was published by Brindle & Glass Publishing in 2017; My Best Friend Was Angela Bennett is her second novel. She currently divides her time between Caledon, Ontario, and the Southern California Desert.

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