The stories in Sandy Bonny’s collection take place in settings from the Arctic Circle to Alberta’s badlands, and from the waters of the Georgia Straight to the grasslands of the prairies, and the characters that we meet in these places will be oddly familiar or perhaps familiarly odd. There are children who live in the magical territory between their imagination and their parents’ realities; road builders from China and Australia who know the ghostly secrets at road’s end; men who shape their lives with the predictability of beehives; women who try to grieve for their unborn children; and those who play at suicide. At the vortex of these surprising plots churns Bonny’s keen interest in science and its unexpected effect on human action and emotion. “Sandy Bonny[‘s] stories move effortlessly from the microcosm of intimate details in the lives of her characters to the macrocosm of great forces that animate the universe and sustain life on earth. Look at the science, she seems to say, and at the fragile miracle of life around us.” — David Carpenter “ . . . these subtle skillful tales have crisp and new flavors; they yield discovery upon discovery. This is a powerful debut collection.” — Fred Stenson

Sandy Bonny is a literary writer with an academic background in the earth sciences. She has been mentored by Lynn Coady, Jan Zwicky, and David Carpenter. Born in Ottawa, she has travelled extensively and presently lives in Saskatoon where she is engaged with sessional teaching and laboratory research, in addition to writing and editing. She has published short fiction since 2002, when her story “Mandala” received second place in the CBC Literary Awards. Her work reflects her science and math interests and is marked by both brevity and a controlled ambiguity. Her stories invite exploration of the multiplicity of views that thrive beneath the authority of science as fact, guide, and divination.

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