Description
Book SynopsisCo-Winner, Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction
Patricia Robertson’s new collection of short fiction, Hour of the Crab, is a work of insight and mastery, each story demonstrating an original vision, intriguing characters, and sophisticated skill.
Readers will travel with Robertson’s vivid characters, sharing their journeys, their challenges, their complicated choices. They will also discover other worlds — from an eleventh-century monastery in France to a near-future British Columbia where apocalyptic wildfires seem to be never-ending.
A young woman discovers the corpse of a Moroccan teenager washed up on the beach in southern Spain and sets out to find his family in a gesture that destabilizes her own. An international aid worker shares her house with the very real ghost of a gardener’s boy. The last speaker of a dying Norse-like language carves the words he remembers into the stones of his house.
Urgent and evocative, immersed in issues of our time, the stories of Hour of the Crab reveal Robertson’s ability to draw in her readers with the heightened realism of her imagined worlds.
Trade Review“Panoramic in scope, precise in detail, stirring in content,
Hour of the Crab is exhilarating and poised, a mythos of modern times. Here are fire gods, migration, and extraterrestrial messages, strange spirits and apparitions rendered harrowingly real. Deftly speculative, menacingly real, these stories compel you to change your life.” -- David Huebert, author of
Peninsula Sinking“
Hour of the Crab is fascinating and dark, playing with the edge of what is real and what could be.” -- Alison Manley *
Miramichi Reader *
“The stories in
Hour of the Crab are compelling, touching on a wide range of human emotions and motivations and told in an interesting and thought-provoking way.” -- Susan Huebert *
Winnipeg Free Press *
