Full Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2012 OTTAWA BOOK AWARD "As a potential heir to the tradition of Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro, McInnis is off to a promising start."--Publishers Weekly An affair that begins in an apothecary's 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 husband's farm. A mother and daughter discuss suicide while hiking a shipwreck survivor's trail. In Nadine McInnis's 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. Nadine McInnis is the author of seven books and the winner of a CBC Literary Award.
Contents
Table of Contents
The Story of Time 3
Heart of Blue, Glowing 26
Blood Secrets 45
Where All the Ladders Start 66
Stone Deaf 89
Snow Moths 109
Bliss 127
Bare Bones 136
The Men Have Gone Hunting 160
Persephone without Maps 172
Endowment 194
Lucky 211
Feigning Death 223
