In these twenty stories Peter Unwin takes a contemporary journey to a place called 'the north', where spaghetti is served 'Italian style' and local economies are based primarily on the sale of dew worms.

Told with a barely-suppressed hilarity, these stories are set, for the most part, against the vanishing backdrop of a once-bountiful Ontario. In a series of acutely drawn incidents, the author strips away the ingrained, romanticized version of rural life to reveal a place where people climb, confidently, and blind drunk, behind the wheel of their pick-up trucks, crash through the spring ice of glacial lakes while carting a case of beer on their shoulders, and happily break every hunting and fishing regulation ever invented.

The intense humour of these stories is tempered only by the realities of the landscapes in which they're set. Unemployment, the collapse of a notorious forest industry, high rates of alcoholism and suicide, all inform The Rock Farmers with its tragic counterpoint. The result is a vital, contemporary portrait of a stubborn people working a hard land, for a doubtful harvest.

Peter Unwin was born in Sheffield, England, and raised in Southern Ontario. He studied at Carleton University in Ottawa. His fiction includes the short story collection The Rock Farmers, which was shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, and the novel Nine Bells for a Man. His non-fiction includes The Wolf’s Head: Writing Lake Superior and Hard Surface: In Search of the Canadian Road. He has travelled extensively in the Canadian north. Currently, he is a Master’s candidate in Culture and Communications at York and Ryerson universities. An avid practitioner of martial arts, baseball, and literature, he lives in Toronto with his wife and two daughters.

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