Keeping the Peace

A soldier’s wife struggles to reconnect with her daughter after her husband is killed overseas. A prostitute refuses the help of the enigmatic and evangelical Jared. A heart attack survivor perplexes his family with his newfound religious euphoria. Character-driven, exploring grief and insularity, Colette Maitland”s short fiction debut shows us the price of keeping the peace in small-town America.Profoundly Canadian, these residents of Tim Horton’s Nation struggle with illness, death and depression and hang on as best they can with true grit. Raymond Carver meets Norman Levine on these pages, which herald the appearance of a fine new writer of everyday realism. – Antanas Sileika If Colette Maitland were a musician, you’d say she had perfect pitch…She writes with enormous empathy about characters whose lives have gone wrong. These stories push us to acknowledge the many flaws and faults that hamper human beings in the search for happiness…and then they push us further, into the realm of understanding, compassion, and forgiveness. – Isabel Huggan