Silent Cruise

The nine pieces collected here, many of them already anthologized in Best Canadian Short Stories and other annuals, bring us a new voice in short fiction—brilliant, stylish, humorous, and humane.

In Timothy Taylor’s “Doves of Townsend,” these words, found in the pages of a field guide to butterflies, throw a lifeline to a young woman struggling to stay emotionally afloat in the wake her father’s suicide. They help her to explain to herself her father’s obsession with beautiful things. They a...