POSSESSED by Jowita Bydlowska and CITIZENS OF LIGHT by Sam Shelstad included in The Globe and Mail’s Book Preview List for Fall!
POSSESSED: Josephine is obsessed. Or possessed — by unrequited love for a younger man who doesn’t promise anything, but who gives her a taste of intimacy that puts her on the brink of losing her mind. Oscillating between her elusive lover and her older former partner, stuck in the hell that is working in a cubicle, and obliged to tend to her destructive, senile mother, Josephine is trapped.
After a work assignment promises to deliver distraction, Josephine makes a decision to visit a former quarantine island in the Adriatic Sea, where she meets an enigmatic, beautiful man with a haunting story. Intimate and erotic, Possessed is a dark and funny story exploring sexual obsession, mental illness, and the supernatural.
Jowita Bydlowska was born in Warsaw, Poland, and moved to Canada as a teenager. She has published two bestselling books: the memoir Drunk Mom and a novel, Guy, as well as dozens of short stories in various magazines and journals. Jowita lives in Toronto.
CITIZENS OF LIGHT: Colleen Weagle works in a call centre and lives in a bungalow with her mother in a quiet Toronto suburb. In her spare time she writes spec scripts for a CBC riding-school drama (her mother’s favourite) and plays an online game set in a resort populated by reindeer. It’s a typical life. Except three months ago Colleen’s husband Leonard–who led a similarly monotonous life–was found in a bog in the middle of the night, a two hours’ drive from home. Dead.
With a flatly optimistic belief in the power of routine, Colleen has been soldiering on, trying not to think too hard about all the unknowns surrounding the death. But when a local news photo twigs Colleen’s memory of a mystery attendee at Leonard’s funeral she snaps into action.
In the maddening company of her ornery co-worker Patti, she heads to Niagara Falls on a quest to find the truth behind the death. Amid the slot machines and grubby hotels, the pair stumble into the darker underworld of a faded tourist trap. What they find will lead straight to an episode from Colleen’s adolescence she thought she’d put firmly behind her.
Bleakly madcap, with deadpan dialogue, Shelstad’s debut novel is a noir anti-thriller reminiscent of Twin Peaks and the work of Ottessa Moshfegh and early Kate Atkinson. He captures call-centre life, ramshackle tourist attractions, and suburbia with wit and sharp realism, and reveals the undercurrents of melancholy and the truly bizarre that can run beneath even the most seemingly mild-mannered lives.
Sam was longlisted for the 2014 CBC Short Story Prize and was a runner up for the 2014 Thomas Morton Memorial Prize. He regularly contributes to McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and has been published in many literary magazines, including The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, and Joyland. His debut story collection, COP HOUSE (Nightwood Editions, 2017), was compared to the work of George Saunders in Quill and Quire, where they remarked, “it is precisely this blend of humour and pathos that give Shelstad’s stories their disarming power.” Sam lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Jowita and Sam are represented by Samantha Haywood.