LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZEAn urgent first novel about breaching the prisons we live inside from one of Canada’s most daring literary talents.An unnamed narrator abandons his unfinished thesis and returns to northern Alberta in search of what eludes him: the shape of the novel he yearns to write, an autobiography of his rural hometown, the answers to existential questions about family, love, and happiness.What ensues is a series of conversations, connections, and disconnections that reveals the texture of life in a town literature has left unexplored, where the friction between possibility and constraint provides an insistent background score.Whether he’s meeting with an auntie distraught over the imprisonment of her grandson, engaging in rez gossip with his cousin at a pow wow, or lingering in bed with a married man after a hotel room hookup, the narrator makes space for those in his orbit to divulge their private joys and...

Superbly rendered portraits of modern indigeneity from the acclaimed author of A Minor Chorus.A grieving mother calls out to her faraway son. A student forgoes the lurid appeal of dating apps in exchange for a painter's love. The anonymous voices of queer native men converge amid violent eroticism. A man just out of prison balances the uneasy weight of family and freedom, while a professor returns home to conduct research only to be haunted by a dark specter. The stories and voices in Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut story collection are buoyed by philosophical undergirding, poetic demand, and the complex relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Belcourt pirouettes through the short story form in his signature staccato voice, imagining a range of characters from all walks of native life. He is an expert in celebrating the ways Indigenous peoples make total conquest impossible."These characters' passionate insistence on loving and desiring and...