Description
"Pick any place you like. Go ahead pick a place and I will long for it to be home." This poetic novel, by turns playful and poignant, follows a family across a continent, through generations, around a city, and into language to find the place that is home. A striking debut novel.
Awards
- Alberta Book Awards - Book Design of the Year 2003
Reviews
"The jurors were particularly delighted by the manner in which the design reflected the text of this book, and its marvellous use of space." BPAA Awards
"A brave and compelling first book." - Susan Rudy
"McGrath paints an engaging and moving picture of the hardships endured by so many early Canadians who struggled to survive in a cold and unforgiving environment." Lynne Perras, Canadian Book Review Annual, 2004
"Recurring Fictions is definitely worth a read, and a reread. I look forward to more works from McGrath." Andrea Kopylech, Legacy Magazine
"The 'Recurring Fictions' in poet Wendy McGrath's first novel concern ancestral ghosts, dreams, train rides, dwelling places, and domestic scenes in a troubled family's life together, especially as precipitated by an absent father mortally afflicted by tobacco and alcohol....The lyrical vignettes so often sustain metaphor and allusion that the short book will benefit from a study of linked imagery, more so than narrative." Ervin Beck, World Literature Today
Reading
In this compelling narrative all parts, dialogue, description, plot, operate as image clusters which gather momentum as the book develops.. [McGrath] uses implosive poetry to shape an emotion-laden story. - Terry Goldie
"A self-consciously literary novel in the best sense, it explores the way home yokes together alienation and belonging." Christopher Wiebe, Vue Weekly
"McGrath dares to be different in Recurring Fictions by giving the novel a rhythm that's unique.... We're also given the story of a working-class Western Canadian family searching for a place to call home. It's the yearning for home and the desire to be on the move toward it that gives this book much of its power.... It's a rich book that demands it be read more than once.... [W]e now have a new, poetic novelist whose voice is one to be savoured." Marc Horton, The Edmonton Journal, July 7/02
"...McGrath's writing is strong and convincing.... Pick any page in the book and you will find poetic fragments, a story, but not a complete story; threads of story, a dream or image, a cryptic message like an advice column on the bottom of the page, small notes." kath macLean, Prairie Fire