The Things She'll Be Leaving Behind

By Vanessa Farnsworth

The women in The Things She’ll Be Leaving Behind are all trying to find their footings, preserve their sanity, and just generally survive in circumstances they never thought they would encounter. They don’t always do it gracefully. Occasionally alcohol or firearms are involved. Just like in real life.

These women go toe-to-toe with chronic liars, dead grandfathers, beleaguered sons, mysterious voices, unfaithful husbands, midnight callers, spiteful sisters, and hallucinated clowns. Husbands go crazy or wayward or missing. Life hits walls and somersaults and does breathless, tactless things. And always it must be dealt with even when the means to do so seem to be entirely absent.

Filled with burnt-at-the-edges dialogue, contemporary humour, and compelling pacing, the stories in The Things She’ll Be Leaving Behind are inventive, energetic and thoroughly original.

"Farnsworth’s range is beautifully demonstrated in this collection..."
-- SaskBooksReviews

"In these tales, anxiety, restlessness and volatility are tapped like raw nerves, and the dangers and menace of events only mitigated by Farnsworth’s savvy use of black comedy and irony...The end result is fascinating inventive fiction."
-- 49th Shelf

"... [these stories] remind us that the purpose of fiction is not always to entertain but occasionally to confound expectations, provoke discomfort, or probe the various folds of the unknown."
-- Quill & Quire

SHORT FICTION
ISBN: 978-1-77187-157-0 ($19.95)
Published by Thistledown Press