Description
“To say Heighton is an immensely talented writer is true enough but insufficient … As good a writer as Canada has ever produced.”—National Post
A man recalls his father’s advice on how to save a drowning person, but struggles when the time comes to use it. A wife’s good deed leaves a couple vulnerable at the moment when they’re most in need of security—the birth of their first child. Newly in love, a man preoccupied by accounts of freak accidents is befallen by one himself. In stories about love and fear, idealisms and illusions, failures of muscle and mind and all the ways we try to care for one another, Steven Heighton’s Instructions for the Drowning is an indelible last collection by a writer working at the height of his powers.
Praise for Steven Heighton
“[A] brilliant storyteller … [His] exquisite, powerful meditations on who we are place Heighton among the great Canadian writers … His focus is contemporary, but he is a practitioner of the old school, a writer for those who love to read widely and deeply.”
—Donna Bailey Nurse, Literary Review of Canada
“The key to the book’s force is Heighton’s imperative to humanize and individualize everyone he encounters … These are not statistics but people, each sensitively depicted … A stunning book, by turns heartbreaking and affirming, fundamentally human in its depth and scope.”
—Quill & Quire (starred review)
“Vivid and powerfully drawn … The Shadow Boxer is an energetic, fluent and interesting novel by a writer who has already shown himself to be gifted, capable of exploring and experimenting with language.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“Heighton works (and plays) with words in wondrous ways few contemporary poets even dream of attempting, let alone conquering.”
—Judith Fitzgerald, Globe and Mail
