Claudia Dey

How to Be a Bush Pilot is boot camp for the modern playboy and sexual adventurer, a master class in becoming the lover that every woman wants but doesn't know how to ask for. It is funny. It is instructive. It winks and flirts. Its unwavering purpose: getting laid. Proficiently.Ranging from remedial education to moves that will educate even the savviest Wilt Chamberlain, Claudia Dey uses female insight to turn mere men into that elusive master of the bedroom: the Bush Pilot. How to Be a Bush Pilot is studded with pop culture references, swinging between high and low art but always focusing on the art of seduction. Think Led Zeppelin meets Ted Hughes meets wood panelling meets Henry Miller meets Def Leppard. In the bedroom.With a tone that reads like Tina Fey channelling Dr. Ruth, Dey ranges from the pre-game warm-ups of flirtation and fantasy, to charming the go-go, to graduating from the regulars to the remote. How to Be a Bush Pilot is fearless, playful, always commanding yet never intimidating--the essential guide for every man who wants to be a legend and wants to laugh while trying.

A Must-Read: The New York Times, Elle, Literary Hub, The Millions, The Globe and Mail, and CBCA Finalist for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction " A] darkly glittering tale . . . Beautiful and piercing." --The New York Times Book Review In Claudia Dey's Daughter, a woman long caught in her father's web strives to make a life--and art--of her own. To be loved by your father is to be loved by God.So says Mona Dean--playwright, actress, and daughter of a man famous for one great novel, a man whose needs and insecurities exert an inescapable pull and exact an immeasurable toll on the women of his family: Mona, her sister, her half sister, their mothers. His infidelity destroyed Mona's childhood, setting her in opposition to a stepmother who, though equally damaged, disdains her for being broken. Then, just as Mona is settling into her life as an adult and a fledgling artist, her father begins a new affair and takes her into his confidence. Mona delights--painfully, parasitically--in this attention. When he inevitably confesses to his wife, Mona is cast as the agent of disruption, punished for her father's crimes and ejected from the family. Mona's tenuous stability is thrown into chaos. Only when she suffers an incalculable loss--one far deeper and more defining than family entanglements--can she begin supplanting absent love with real love. Pushed to the precipice, she must decide how she wants to live, what she most needs to say, and the risks she will take to say it. Claudia Dey chronicles our most intimate lives with penetrating insight and devilish humor. Daughter is an obsessive, blazing examination of the forces that drive us to become, to create, and to break free.

'An incandescent flare of a novel... I loved it' SOPHIE MACKINTOSH 'A dark star of a book' LAUREN GROFF 'I loved its every page' SHEILA HETI 'Heartbreaker totally bewitched me' LENI ZUMAS

The love between a daughter and her mother--and the dark secrets they keep from each other--are at the heart of this wildly imaginative novel that combines elements of The Handmaid's Tale, Stranger Things, and Twin Peaks. "I love Heartbreaker's outlandishness, its sizzling energy--the bright, fierce music in every sentence."--Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks It's 1985. Pony Darlene Fontaine has lived all her fifteen years in "the territory," a settlement founded decades ago by a charismatic cult leader. In this strange town run on a sinister economic resource, the women crimp their hair and wear shoulder pads, and the teenagers listen to Nazareth and Whitesnake on their Walkmans. Pony's family lives in the bungalow at the farthest edge of town, where the territory borders the rest of the wider world--a place none of the townspeople have ever been. Except for Billie Jean Fontaine, Pony's mother. When Billie Jean arrived in the territory seventeen years prior--falling from the open door of a stolen car--the residents took her in and made her one of their own. She was the first outsider they had ever laid eyes on. Pony adores and idolizes her mother, but like everyone else in the territory she is mystified by her. Billie Jean refuses to describe the world she came from. One night, Billie Jean grabs her truck keys, bolts barefoot into the cold October darkness--and vanishes. Beautiful, beloved, and secretive, Billie Jean was the first person to be welcomed into the territory. Now, with a frantic search under way for her missing mother, Pony fears: Will she be the first person to leave it too? Told from the three unforgettable perspectives of a daughter, a killer dog, and a teenage boy named Supernatural, this novel is startling in its humor and wrenching in its wisdom about the powers, limits, and dangers of love. Heartbreaker is an electrifying page-turner about a woman reinventing herself in order to survive--and a daughter who must race against the clock to untangle the mysteries left in her mother's wake. Praise for Heartbreaker "A fierce exploration of memory and zeitgeist . . . Heartbreaker is a darkly comedic weirdo of a book that pulls the string of nostalgia from one side while unraveling it from the other."--The Paris Review "This is a book like no other. It's eerie, it's cult-y, it's so very exciting, and I never wanted it to end."--Buzzfeed, Best Books of Fall 2018 "Claudia Dey renders 1985 in perfectly crimped, shoulder-padded detail. . . . Come for the Shyamalanian premise. Stay for the hard-rock soundtrack."--Chicago Tribune

Eugenia Ledoux wakes one morning to a note on the kitchen table: "Gone to save the world. Sorry. Yours, Sheb Woolly Ledoux. Asshole." Eugenia is nine years old, a synaesthesiac and a tightrope walker. She adores her father and his lunatic charms; she loves that he takes her fishing in the middle of the night and calls her Stunt. Sheb has always promised he'll one day take her to the moonscape of northern Ontario, where astronauts train; instead he writes a note, blows up a shoulder-pad factory, and leaves. His heartbroken daughter is left behind with her mother, the sharp-edged former ingenue Mink, and her sister, the death-obsessed and hauntingly beautiful Immaculata. After a fake funeral for Sheb, Mink vanishes too. Eugenia and Immaculata, left alone, double in age overnight. Immaculata becomes a swan-like giantess, and soon finds her calling caring for Leopold, a diseased and irresistible malcontent down the street. Eugenia, however, stays the same: dark and diminutive, and bereft. She finds herself a bicycle and sets off to track down her father, encountering an astronaut and a waitress named Cupid along the way. Stunt is the first novel by one of Canada's most acclaimed playwrights. Like synaesthetic Eugenia, your senses will be addled as Dey's words take on colours, tastes, and smells, somehow coming to mean more than you thought they did; they depict, with compassionate hilarity and luminous heartbreak, the love between a girl and her father.

Described by Variety as 'Yukon Gothic,' Claudia Dey's acclaimed play Trout Stanley is set in northern British Columbia, on the outskirts of a mining town between Misery Junction and Grizzly Alley. In this inhospitable setting live a pair of sisters, twins who are not identical in any way: Sugar, a complicated, insecure waif who still wears the tracksuit her mother died in ten years prior, and Grace, a rough-and-tumble hellcat who owns the local dump. At the play's opening, it is their thirtieth birthday, and the TV news has announced the disappearance of a local Scrabble-champ stripper. While Grace is at the dump, housebound Sugar is surprised by a mysterious drifter, one Trout Stanley, foot fetishist and fake cop, who is searching for the lake where his parents drowned -- a fishy story if there ever was one. He quickly becomes mired in a surreal love triangle with the two sisters. Trout Stanley is about three people who confuse codependence for co-operation and affliction for affection. An eccentric, captivating story in which the biggest catch of all is love. Lavishly illustrated by Jason Logan.