Cluck is a darkly comic novel about Henry, an only child whose mother has bipolar disorder. As a teen, Henry becomes a radio junkie lost in the world of music. As a young man, he becomes obsessed with a female DJ whose evening show mysteriously beams out of Idaho and into his car while he’s driving over Vancouver’s Lions Gate Bridge. Henry has to live his life in the shadow cast by his mother, but he never completely gives up hope that he can find his place. Slowly, when he’s in his thirti...

Her name is Vanessa and she’s pissed off with getting old. Forced out of her high fashion job in Toronto, Vanessa freewheels into the rapid destruction of her long and comfortable marriage which in turn sends her on a comical retreat to a holistic campus on a far-flung island. There she grapples with being a single, childless woman closing in on sixty who only now realizes that she never finished breaking up with the wild bass player she met in Victoria decades earlier. Forced to confront ...

A revised and updated edition of a collection of personal essays that illuminate what life is like for those who live with mental illness, and how it impacts their family members.More than 4 million Canadians and 57 million Americans suffer from a diagnosable mental illness, and yet there are still considerable stigmas and a great deal of misunderstanding surrounding even the most common diagnoses—schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, obsessive-compulsi...

Dovetail Joint—the strongest of joints, it works best under tension.Front cover final 200 wideIn Dovetail Joint and other stories, Lenore Rowntree portrays the subtle deceits of intimacy that arise when an expectation is not met. We encounter Vanessa in six linked stories, at five distinct and evocative moments in her life, as she moves through a series of beautifully drawn relationships and landscapes. Rowntree explores the value of both persistence and its opposite in this Cubist...