Description
Book SynopsisFinalist, New Brunswick Book Award (Fiction) and Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction
A striking original, deftly humorous collection of stories that considers the quest for truth: how we come to it or alternatively avoid it.
A fervently comic debut, The Running Trees leads readers into a series of conversations — through phonelines, acts in a play, and a rewound recording of a police interrogation — to reveal characters in fumbling bouts of brutality, reflection, isolation, and love.
The relationship between two siblings disintegrates after one asks the other for the pen; a professor and his former student get drinks years after a "romantic" encounter; a book club meets only to find that they have wildly different opinions about a new memoir about their town; and a long-haired feline contemplates existence and consciousness while his cohabitant licks his own butthole.
Whimsical, unconventional, humorous, and always pitch-perfect, The Running Trees explores how we desperately try to communicate with each other amid the gaps in meaning we create.
Trade Review“Energetic, often hilarious, and endlessly surprising. Reading this collection feels like eavesdropping on a series of engrossing conversations. McMillan skillfully inhabits the voices of this cast of characters, in situations that range from the suspenseful and unsettling to the deliciously absurd. The people in this book are flawed and human, prickly and curious, and remarkably distinct. Through their questions, complaints, arguments, and apologies,
The Running Trees explores the intricacies of human interaction, and the difference between what we say and what we mean.” -- Shashi Bhat, author of
The Most Precious Substance on Earth“An anthology of unique stories that ... delve into the chaotic, tangled aspects of imperfect yet quintessentially human characters. A brisk read that lingers long in the memory,
The Running Trees is highly recommended.” *
Midwest Book Review *
