Bøker av Erica McKeen

In the summer of 2020, with a heat wave bearing down and a brood of periodical cicadas climbing into the trees, Husha mourns the recent death of her mother while quarantining with her ailing grandfather, Arthur, at his lakeside cabin in remote Ontario. They're soon joined by Husha's ex-lover, Nellie, who arrives without explanation to complete their trio.Also among them is a strange book, discovered by Husha while cleaning out her mother's house. When she, Arthur and Nellie begin to read it together, they learn that her mother's last missive was a short story collection, crawling with unsettling imagery and terrifying transformations. As the stories bleed into their cloistered life in the cabin, they must each reckon with loss, longing and what it means to truly know another person. Incantatory and atmospheric, Cicada Summer is a dazzlingly original novel about how we grieve and care for one another.

A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF 2022A reclamation of female rage and a horrifyingly deformed Bildungsroman.Frances is quiet and reclusive, so much so that her upstairs roommates sometimes forget she exists. Isolated in the basement, and on the brink of graduating from university, Frances herself starts to question the realities of her own existence. She cant remember there being a lock on the door at the top of the basement stairsand yet, when she turns the knob, the door wont open. She cant tell the difference between her childhood memories, which bloom like flowers in the dark basement, and herdreams. Worse still, she cant ignore the very real tapping sound nowcominginsistently, violentlythreatening to break through her bedroom wall.With the thematic considerations of Mary Shelley and Shirley Jacksons work, and in the style of Herta Mller and Daisy Johnson, Tearis both a horrifyingly deformed Bildungsroman and a bristling reclamation of female rage. Blurring the real and the imagined, this lyric debut novel unflinchingly engages with contemporary feminist issues and explores the detrimental effects of false narratives, gaslighting, and manipulation on young women.