RYAN TURNER

Family matters dominate Ryan Turner’s exceptional collection of short fiction, Half-Sisters & Other Stories. The characters in these dramatically subtle, psychologically probing stories are often coping with or reacting to tragic or unhappy events—separation, estrangement, sudden death—and are compelled by circumstance to re-connect in tentative or awkward fashion with family members with whom they may have had little contact and who are largely unknown to them. In the first story, “Unusual Facts of Canadian History,” young Ben recalls the summer he lived in his grandmother’s house in New Brunswick. Ben’s life is unsettled because his mother has left him and his father and moved to Halifax. In sparkling prose, Turner describes Ben’s attempts to impose structure on long, empty summer days and his search for comfort and meaning in the eccentric behaviour of the largely unreliable adults with whom he is living. The title story recounts a tension-filled family dynamic. Cora’s mother has died, and she finds herself in the position of having to reach out to Louisa, a half-sister with whom she has been out of touch for years—the offspring of her father and his second wife. In the end, however, Cora’s initial reluctance to make contact with a young woman with whom she shares a father but nothing else has begun to transform into a warm sensation of gratitude when she realizes that this new connection has the potential to enrich her life in ways she wasn’t anticipating. And in “Moving,” Theo’s mother has died, and he and his grandmother (who had been living with her late daughter) are traveling by train from New Brunswick to Halifax, where his grandmother will move in with him and his girlfriend. In this volume Ryan Turner writes about lives in transition while evoking a prevailing mood steeped in melancholy nostalgia. The world of these stories is one in which an unforeseen incident can signal the permanent disruption of familiar routines, and where people are often left facing an uncertain future. For Turner’s characters, circumstances are always shifting, pieces are constantly moving around, people and things are being left behind. Even the prospect of change can cause characters to act in surprising ways: in “The Poet” (with its northern Russian setting this story is the clear outlier of the collection), the commander of a prison camp, where non-conformists serve their time in exile, knows his own life will be diminished if his favourite prisoner, Volotsky, the poet, is allowed to go free when his sentence expires and selfishly ensures that Volotsky’s punishment is extended. In this, his second collection (after the superb linked collection What We’re Made Of , published in 2009) Ryan Turner has written a series of poignant but unsentimental stories using language that is understated and elegant. Throughout this volume, Turner’s writing is assured, mature and, in this age of excess, refreshingly economical. Fans of the contemporary short story will find much to enjoy and admire in these pages.… (altro)

Strong first collection by Halifax fiction writer Turner follows the romantic and artistic fortunes of twenty something aspiring author Benjamin Wallace in these eleven concise stories. Benjamin chronicles his own story through the lives of others, maintaining an ironic distance from friends and relatives and his own emotions, and yet appears to be conducting an earnest search for something he can commit to--a substantial friendship, a relationship deep enough to allow him to put down roots. Not surprisingly, nothing is resolved at the end. In these stories Turner employs a voice that is distinctive, writing tightly controlled minimalist prose that avoids lengthy description where a single word will suffice, and yet is filled with shimmering detail. An impressive debut from a writer worth watching.… (altro)