Progress
(Cormorant, 2011)
ART 106
Since her fiancé’s death at eighteen, Helen Massey has spent her life avoiding it. Change comes when her town is only months away from being thirty feet under water. A government agency, The Power Authority, is relocating the entirety of her hometown to make way for a power dam project. What can’t be moved will be torn down. Even the cemetery is to be dug up and reinterred nearby. While visiting her lover’s grave, Helen witnesses a man fall to his death on the power dam worksite. “He fell like a sack, straight down, with one arm waving in circles. He fell past the other workman strapped into a harness who must have been surprised to see him pass. Mocking the air. It seemed he fell without a sound.” That same day, her brother returns unannounced after a fifteen-year absence. Robert Massey was a runaway. The construction made his homecoming a “now or never” decision, he tells his sister. “I didn’t want to have to come back in a boat to see the family home.” When Robert discovers his parents kept the reasons for his departure a secret—too little has changed—he confesses, hoping his sister might bury the past. So begins their transformations. The siblings must negotiate their shared history, and their differences, if they are to find themselves a future.
(Description Source: Cormorant)
Author
Michael V. Smith is an associate professor at the University of British Columbia, where he teaches creative writing. His first novel, Cumberland, was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca / Books in Canada First Novel Award. His short fiction has won the Western Magazine Gold Award for Fiction and been nominated for the Journey Prize. In 2007, Smith received the Dayne Ogilvie Award for Emerging Gay Writers and Vancouver’s Community Hero of the Year Award. A native of Cornwall, Ontario, Smith currently lives in Kelowna, BC.
UBC Library Holdings
How to Purchase this Book
From the Publisher – Cormorant
From Used-book Sellers – ABE, Amazon, Antiqbook, Biblio, Vialibri
Paper ISBN: 9781770860001
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