The stories that make up Catharine Leggett’s masterly new collection,
In Progress, demonstrate the writer’s ability to convey, within the confines of
a single narrative, the entirety of the lives of the girls and women who make up her subjects—unlikely narrators who are, nevertheless, heartbreakingly reliable. Just as each part of a hologram contains a particular perspective of the image, it also includes the entire object. So, too, do these stories. Chronic disappointment metastasizes into a bedrock of scar tissue to found a life upon; self-sacrifice goes postal; and no one is who they seem—you may never look at the woman who tops your coffee off at the donut shop the same, or the checkout girl at the grocery store. Meticulously crafted, humane, but never sentimental, and firmly anchored in its time and place, In Progress gives the reader much to ponder and even more to savour.
—Melissa Hardy, author of A Cry of Bees, Broken Road, Surface Rights, Constant Fire, The Uncharted Heart, and others
Catharine Leggett’s prize-winning short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies and
journals in Canada and the United States, as well as online publications, and on CBC Radio. She is the winner of the Okanagan Fiction Award, and a two-time finalist in the Columbus Creative Cooperative Great Novel Contest. She is the author of a novel, The Way to Go Home (Urban Farmhouse Press, 2019). She lives in London, Ontario, Canada.
