Blood Secrets

Description

Shortlisted for the 2012 Ottawa Book AwardAs a potential heir to the tradition of Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro, McInnis is off to a promising start.Publishers WeeklyAn affair that begins in an apothecarys garden brings Joyce to a hospice, where she tends to the dying alongside her own grief. A middle-aged woman recalls the lovable, lavable secret of the first night spent on her husbands farm. A mother and daughter discuss suicide while hiking a shipwreck survivors trail.In Nadine McInniss sophomore collection, boozers repent, gamblers reform, cheaters suffer, the deaf speak volumes, and cancer patients string flowers in their hair. Probing and compassionate, executed with a steady hand, Blood Secrets is an excavation of endings and their revelations: the affair that ends a marriage, the disease that ends a life, the effect of a long-ago suicide. And as her characters struggle to administer to each other in their final moments, each story becomes an autopsy, dissecting bodies for their secrets and daily life for the things it hides.Praise forBlood SecretsSo finely drawn, at once evocative and narratively fulfilled, each one greater than the sum of its subtle parts. Exquisite.Ann-Marie MacDonald, author ofFall on Your KneesNadine McInniss extraordinary images add an eerie clarity to her fiction mix as she distills the ardent ways we perceive or deceive one another in these marvelously swift examinations of loss and redemption.Elisabeth Harvor, author ofExcessive Joy Injures the HeartMcInniss prose is galvanized by deft dialogue and imagery that keens with a poets sensibility, and her recurring themes are hauntingly conveyed without lapsing into excessive grimness.Quill & QuireI feel like Ive uncovered a treasurethe minds brilliance and transcendence embedded in a deep geology of love and pain.Marilyn BoweringMcInnis alerts the reader that shes not messing around; what follows will be aching and very bodily, in these stories blood will spill and hearts will break [she] puts you on the inside of [her] characters, mapping their meaty interiors.National PostMcInnis is a master of nuance, the unsaid that speaks volumes stunning, highly nuanced, utterly moving and profound.The Winnipeg Review[With] lean and lyrical languageand arresting imagesBlood Secretsis a deceptively gentle book, a desperately tender succession of tales that bruise the heart with their sadness, while at the same time offering the salve of kindness. Literary Review of Canada