Books | cynthiaflood.com

In You Are Here, Cynthia Flood navigates a wide range of subject matter with a writing style which gradually becomes more intense, tighter, and sometimes experimental with each story. Most themes are familiar—love, hate, children, the natural world, parents, failure, despair, anger, regret. Other stories are more unusual, but remain perceptively relevant, dealing with topics such as far-left political activity and enduring the social pressures that come from family and peers. Containing what may be some of Flood’s most poignant work, You Are Here is a sharp and engaging exploration of the world today.

What Can You Do

Publisher: Biblioasis
1st Ed: August 22, 2017
Language: English
SKU/ISBN: 9781771961769

In these twelve stories that unfold over a few hours or a weekend or five decades, adults deceive themselves about their motives—greed, desire for control, jealousy, fear, ambition. With unflinching realism, reminiscent of William Trevor, Cynthia Flood exposes the failings of the human heart and, with a marvellous unsentimental brutality, leaves many a character unredeemed.

Red Girl Rat Boy

Publisher: Biblioasis
1st Ed: September 10, 2013
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1927428416
ISBN-13: 978-1927428412

Young women, old women. The hair-obsessed, the politically driven, the sure-footed, the bony-butted, the awkward and compulsive and alone. Sleep-deprived and testy. Exhausted and accepting. Among the innumerable wives, husbands, sisters, and in-laws vexed by short temper and insecurity throughout the collection, Cynthia Flood’s protagonists stand out as masters of a reality that the rest of the world will only partially understand. New from the Journey Prize-winning author, ‘Red Girl Rat Boy’ is a collection of astonishing range and assured technique, whose voices—gothic, peculiar, domestic, and strange—remain as passionate and complex as ever.
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The English Stories

Publisher: Biblioasis
1st Ed: April 30 2009
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1-897231-56-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-897231-56-2

These linked stories are set in 1950s England, at a girls’ school and in a small residential hotel. They’re about ambition, class, colonialism, the decline of empire, and how girls struggle to grow up. The Vancouver Sun called The English Stories “a remarkable book.” The Globe & Mail headed its online review “In a class of her own.”
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Making A Stone of the Heart

Publisher: Key Porter
1st Ed:April 13 2002
Language:
English
ISBN-10: 1552634523
ISBN-13: 978-1552634523

When curmudgeonly Owen Jones died in a Bella Coola nursing home, no one who knew the elderly man could imagine the extraordinary story of his life. Spooling backwards through time against the backdrop of Vancouver’s raw, exuberant growth over the last hundred years, Making a Stone of the Heart tells Owen’s story and those of his lover, Dora Dow, and of Dr. Jonathan Smyth.
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My Father Took a Cake to France

Publisher: Talonbooks
2nd Printing: Feb. 15, 1992
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0889223106
ISBN-13: 978-0889223103

Cynthia Flood is the winner of the prestigious Journey prize for Fiction for the title story in this collection.
Her previous collection of stories, The Animals In Their Elements, was published to critical acclaim by Talonbooks in 1987.
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The Animals in Their Elements

Publisher: Talonbooks 1st Ed: Feb. 15, 1987
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0889222495
ISBN-13: 978-0889222496

A woman goes to Toronto to sort out her deceased mother’s things; an obnoxious father-to-be disrupts a prenatal class; an orphaned British boy is sent to Canada to be raised by his unmarried aunt.
The people in these stories have familiar concerns – attachment, loss, aging, and coming of age – and the fluid writing gives easy access to their lives.
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