Award Winning Canadian Writer, Cynthia Flood

Praise for Cynthia Flood’s Earlier Books

With rapid-fire narration, power-point prose, and darts of minimalist description, Flood nails her subject. Her characters are impatient to be heard, grabbing your attention, word bullets flying, hope and despair spilling over the pages. The subtext is anger, disappointment, hopelessness, cynicism, end of life ruminations, and what went wrong?
MAC Farrant, Vancouver Sun
Flood is a highly accomplished stylist, whose technique is tightly calibrated and precise. “My ideal,” she has said, “is a story in which each word’s presence can be justified.” Anything superfluous is ruthlessly pared away, resulting in a presentation that frequently resembles pointillism. In both cases discrete elements — words, sentences or dabs of colour — congeal to create something recognizable and aesthetically pleasing, but the whole is utterly dependent on the interaction of its parts: change one thing and the entire piece suffers.
Steven Beattie, National Post
The best fiction challenges, enlightens, even disturbs, and these qualities are evident in Flood’s collection. Here’s a mirror, she is saying, now take a long, hard look.
The Vancouver Sun.

Awards:

  • Journey Prize 1990 for story “My Father Took a Cake to France”
  • Western Magazines Gold Award 1994 for story “Country Life”
  • National Magazines Gold Award fiction 2000 for story “Religious Knowledge”
  • Prism International 2nd Prize fiction 2000 for “Religious Knowledge”
  • Nomination for City of Vancouver Book Award 2002 for novel Making a Stone of the Heart

What Can You Do ~ Reviews

CYNTHIA FLOOD AT THE TOP OF HER GAME IN WHAT CAN YOU DO
Veteran Canadian short story writer Flood isn’t a household name, but should be.

 

“Her latest collection, What Can You Do? (sic) cements her reputation as a gifted and observant storyteller.

 

Technically superb, demonstrating Flood’s unstinting grasp of complex, subterranean emotion, these twelve stories tread familiar territory. The haunting “Struggle,” about a disturbed woman’s memories of her activist past, mines the rivalries and chauvinism of far-left politics in 1970s Vancouver.”

~ Trevor Corkum, The Toronto Star, 8/11/17

Read the full review here.

Special to The Globe and Mail
Steven W. Beattie
September 15, 2017

 

NEW: The Winnipeg Review

As the fifth collection of short stories from an award-winning author, it’s no surprise that What Can You Do is an exceptionally written and thought-provoking read. The twelve stories make up just under 150 pages, and in each one Flood does a masterful job creating a sense of existence for her characters that extends beyond the pages of their story.
~ Joanna Graham
September 25, 2017

 

The Vancouver Sun Review of What Can You Do

Magic 8 Q & A with CBC Books. Read the interview.

NEW: Review in Pickle Me This

I knew I was in very good company when I was out for dinner in late September, and we were talking about books, and every single one of us had something admiring to say about the work of Cynthia Flood.
~ Kerry Clare, Pickle Me This December 5, 2017.

 

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