Paul Carlucci

'Exceptionally vivid and intense' Sunday Times 'A marvellously dark yarn' The Spectator 'A swaggering debut' Daily Mail Everyone expects at least a little bit of deception... Alex is a motherless stockboy in 1830s Montreal, waiting desperately for his father to return from France. Serge, a drunken fur trader, promises food and safety in return for friendship, but an expedition into the forest quickly goes awry... The Voyageur is a brilliantly realised novel set on the margins of British North America, where kindness is costly and the real wilderness may not be in the landscape but in the desperate hearts of men.

Finalist, Ottawa Book Award for Fiction 2019Long-Shortlisted, 2019 Relit Award (Short Story Category)Drugs. Violence. Racism. Despair. The tiny, northern town of Fort Fierce has issues in spades, and most of them fester in the high-rise by the lake.In this visceral, emotionally raw, and completely absorbing collection, Carlucci takes his readers through the ravaged history of Franklin Place, from its construction during the Cold War to its demolition decades later. We meet the Franklins themselves, three generations of landlords, each more paranoid and alienated than the last. And we meet their tenants: a drug dealer, a lonely bigot, a political activist, a struggling father, a wandering sex offender, a woman who refuses to give into it all. They wander in and out of each other's lives, with little in common but the building and the mould behind its walls.In The High-Rise in Fort Fierce, Carlucci immerses us in a dim yet eerily familiar world. Love and death, conflict and compromise, fear, determination, and the tense relations between indigenous and settler populations thread the warp and weft of his dark and irrepressible tapestry. We cannot look away.

Quietly atmospheric and darkly foreboding, A Plea for Constant Motion is an ominous, and occasionally unnerving, new work of fiction by award-winning author Paul CarlucciPenetrating and visceral, yet always offset by small moments of tenderness and humour, A Plea for Constant Motion is a powerful examination of the innate desire in everyone to change their lives and strive for something better.Two couples share a disastrous dinner after their children are killed in a botched kidnapping overseas. A teacher with a passion for cartography orchestrates a bizarre apology after intentionally hitting a student. Desperate to be friends, a man ignores his neighbour’s strange behaviour to the peril of himself and others. A young girl babysits for a family friend, dimly aware that her presence is required for more than just childcare.Dexterously divided into two parts and a surreal intermission, the characters in these stories find themselves confronted by situations that leave them either struggling to escape or firmly rooted in place. Paul Carlucci’s formidable work is by turns familiar and disquieting, sober and surreal, a stark and carefully crafted examination of the human condition.