Sheila Peters

Isabel Lee's early life in rural BC was forever changed by a brief but powerful love affair with a young Oblate priest. Now a recovering alcoholic, Isabel struggles to pull the tattered fragments of her life together and repair the damage to her relationship with her estranged daughter. Once idealistic and hopeful, Father lvaro Ruiz now has his own demons to confront. Brutally tortured at the hands of the Guatemalan authorities and unable to escape from the wounds of his past, lvaro returns to Canada seeking sanctuary, a broken man with a tenuous grip on his faith in God and humanity. Isabel and lvaro's stories slowly weave together and they are eventually faced with their greatest challenge yet: can they carry on in the wake of the damage and bring themselves to forgive? Compelling and disturbing, but ultimately hopeful, this is the story of how we find grace in the most unexpected places.

Sheila Peters makes her impressive fiction debut with a collection of loosely linked stories whose characters, whether they live in the Queen Charlotte Islands or the Prairies, are ordinary men and women who have seemingly everyday experiences that glimmer with the extraordinary. Her spare, stripped-down prose, leavened with sly humour and a gift for poetic resonance, reminds one of the work of Alice Munro or Sandra Birdsell. Peters creates people who often feel out of sync with the spiritual, emotional, and physical environments they find themselves in. Two old people on a farm try to comprehend the inevitable fate befalling them, all the while contemplating the strange goings-on of neighbours. A young woman on the lam from Texas finds herself beached in the Queen Charlottes on her way to Alaska. A punked-up Vancouver girl accompanies a crusty grandmother on a tense hunting trek in the drizzly woods. Their universe is our universe, but with a twist that makes it refreshingly new and decidedly different.