What's Left Us is a stunning fiction debut by one of the most promising new writers in Canada. The novella and stories in these pages startle and engage the reader with their humour, warmth and grace. The novella traces one week in the life of a young, unmarried Irish woman about to give birth. The heroine is a hip, independent woman who muses on memory, love, loss and inheritance in a clever, wry and moving way. The other stories are set in Dublin, the U.K., Vancouver and Ontario and continue Hunter's funny and insightful exploration of quirky characters and situations. What's Left Us offers us exacting and exciting words by a prodigiously talented young writer.

From Aislinn Hunter, the award-winning author of The World Before Us, comes a vivid novel reminiscent of Anthony Doerr and Michael Ondaatje, about the entwined fates of two very different refugees in two distinct moments: a war-torn Spanish border town in the 1940s; and a British island in the 1970s, as a ship full of would-be migrants approaches shore.1940 in the Spanish border city of Portbou. As the shadow of fascism lengthens over Europe, three mysterious travellers arrive in town. They carry themselves with the casual ease of Parisian intellectuals, but in reality this trio of two men and a woman are starving, desperate and exhausted from dodging bullets and German forces to cross illegally through the Pyrenees. Their goal is to escape notice in Spain long enough to book transit to Portugal, and then to the USA. Their story, told over a period of 48 absorbing and tense hours, is narrated by one of the men, a writer who gradually accepts...

Stay follows Abbey, a young woman from Canada now living in a village outside Galway. She falls in love with Dermot, an older Irish man, in an unconventional, affectionate but troubled relationship.      The extraordinary skill of Stay lies in its unsentimental depiction of modern Ireland. The inhabitants of Dermot's village form a riotous and poignant chorus, commenting on their rapidly changing world with wit and insight. Here is a beautiful, funny and richly rewarding novel about history and obligation, and above all, the meaning of human connection in a land poised uneasily between past and present.Review• "For all the complexity in Hunter's book . . . there is also a minute attention to detail and an elegance in the natural dialogue. Hunter heaps ideas on you, ideas you want to stop and think about, in such a subtle, tender way that you never feel assaulted, but rather protected." --The Globe and Mail • "Hunter has created a redolent, peat-reeking sense of Ireland, mournful but sometimes blackly hilarious. . . . The smell of life is what makes Stay so compelling." --Vancouver SunAbout the AuthorAISLINN HUNTER's acclaimed collection of stories, What's Left Us, was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award and the ReLit Prize. Her masterful poetry collection, Into the Early Hours, was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Prize and won the Gerald Lampert Award.

In the tradition of A. S. Byatt's Possession, a hauntingly poignant novel about madness, loss, and the ties that bind our past to our present Deep in the woods of northern England, somewhere between a dilapidated estate and an abandoned Victorian asylum, fifteen-year-old Jane Standen lived through a nightmare. She was babysitting a sweet young girl named Lily, and in one fleeting moment, lost her. The little girl was never found, leaving her family and Jane devastated. Twenty years later, Jane is an archivist at a small London museum that is about to close for lack of funding. As a final research project--an endeavor inspired in part by her painful past--Jane surveys the archives for information related to another missing person: a woman who disappeared over one hundred years ago in the same woods where Lily was lost. As Jane pieces moments in history together, a portrait of a fascinating group of people starts to unfurl. Inexplicably tied...