The Roaring Girl

WINNER OF THE GOVERNOR GENERAL’S LITERARY AWARD

A balance struck between the wild comedy of Famous Players and the psychological realism of White Buick. Its focus is the strangeness and improbability of our relationships, their potent effects upon us, the strange and improbable ways we seek to be free and to be bound, and the stranger and more improbable ways we succeed at both.

Twelve stories, about a tenant who commits suicide in the garage, a housewife who inadvertently gives away a box of medical supplies intended for Sudan, a feckless young man’s relationship with a stroke victim, a boy’s obsession with his parents’ female boarder, a confessional dinner party, a property appraiser who believes the end of the world is near, a young man who returns home to find his parents have given away his room, a man who discovers the meaning of life on the roof of his house . . .