Description
Winner of the QWF First Book Prize
An academic’s wife, struggling to keep up with her husband’s quest to find a long-dead author’s Tahitian love-garden, realizes that her own idea of paradise no longer includes her husband. An architect dreams of slender redheads, Champlain’s astrolabe, and a brush with mortality—and finds at least the latter at Danseuses 7 Jours. An elderly man boards a trans-Pacific flight in an attempt to elude the prediction of a psychic, only to understand too late how the prophecy has shaped his actions.
In All the Voices Cry, modern life collides with all the old pushes and pulls: city and country, the global and the local, the ideal and the real. Petersen’s characters chase the mirage of escape, and are brought up hard by reality. This is a book rooted in landscape, tangled in the brambles of personal history, and it introduces in Alice Petersen a wondrous new voice that is yours to discover.
Praise for All the Voices Cry
“Finely crafted and pared down to their bare essentials … These are stories that work on multiple levels, and continue to divulge their secrets after several rereadings.”—Quill & Quire
“Among the book’s pleasures are bursts of descriptive panache.”—Globe and Mail
“All the Voices Cry has to be counted one of the most assured short story debuts in recent years.”—goodreports.net
“Alice Petersen writes as eloquently about the natural world as she does about the world of human emotion and desire. This is a wise and impressive collection of stories.”—David Bezmozgis, author of The Free World
“Alice Petersen’s All the Voices Cry is masterful and potent—incredibly satisfying for a reader.”—Kathleen Winter, author of Annabel
“The story is balanced between this sense of nostalgia and acceptance, and sustained by the narrator’s charming voice and her gift for physical description.”—David Bezmozgis, on “After Summer”
“These stories are lively, immediate … the metaphorical eye and the ear for voice are strong here.”—David Adams Richards Prize, Winner’s Citation (2009)
“All the Voices Cry announces itself early on as something of a gift…The authorial voice, far from being elusive, is sharply, poetically present.” — Landfall
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