Meredith Quartermain

Award-winning author Meredith Quartermain's second novel and seventh book, U Girl, is a coming-of-age story set in Vancouver in 1972, a city crossed between love-in hip and forest-corp square. Frances Nelson escapes her small-town background to attend first-year university in the big city. "You've got to find the great love," her new friend Dagmar tells her. But what makes it love instead of sex? And what kind of love bonds friends? She gleans surprising answers from Jack, a construction worker; Dwight, a mechanic and dope peddler; Carla, a bar waitress who's seen better days; and her English professor and sailing friend, Nigel. U Girl blurs the line between fiction and reality as Frances begins to write a novel about the people she comes to know. With seamless metafictional play and an engagement with place that has come to be Quartermain's definitive style, U Girl tells the story of a woman's struggle to be taken seriously -- to be equal to men despite her sexual attraction to them, and to dislodge accepted narratives of gender and class in the institution of the university during the "free love" era.In this sprawling and perceptive novel, Quartermain takes us through sexual experimentation, drugs, working at menial jobs, meditating on Wreck Beach, sailing up through Desolation Sound, and studying at the University of British Columbia. U Girl pays homage to local haunts and literary influences in equal measure. Quartermain brings to Canadian literature a wholesome and vital female perspective in this long-awaited bildungsroman.

At the height of the Great Depression, two Prairie children struggle with poverty and uncertainty. Surrounded by religion, law, and her authoritarian father, Cora Wagoner daydreams about what it would be like to abandon society altogether and join one of the Indian tribes she's read so much about. Saddened by struggles with Indian Agent restrictions, Hunter George wonders why his father doesn't want him to go to the residential school. As he too faces drastic change, he keeps himself sane with his grandmother's stories of Wisahkecahk.As Cora and Hunter sojourn through a landscape of nuisance grounds and societal refuse, they come to realize that they exist in a land that is simultaneously moving beyond history and drowning in its excess.

Suppose fiction is a mansion of mirrors where narrative, setting and plot are characters, and suppose this castle is haunted by Martians constantly rearranging, reversing and transelating its furniture of myths, fables and nursery rhymes. Let's play space-wars, say the Martians, it's just a game � our guns shoot words. You zap a Martian. She disappears, but it turns out this Martian is a master chef who even created a recipe for life. How are you going to get the recipe back? How rebuild her carnival laboratory? Near the end of these wry and witty pages we are told of someone from Ontario, and the same page asks, Where is Ontario from? The same could be asked of the Red Planet, or Quartermain's ingredients: her lists, her seemingly endless strings of relations made tastier by the weight of form, be they tales, news reports, voice imitations. Metaphysics, local history, classics, astronomy � the reference range is vast, but so is the contemporary experience. A rising crust! � Michael Turner