An enjoyable collection of short stories, many of them dealing with loneliness and the feeling of not belonging. Most are set in Canada.
Contents: Part 1. The Marianne stories. A plume of white smoke -- The Christmas room -- Every waking moment -- Part 2. The freedom in American songs -- Of the fountain -- You seem a little bit sad -- The Zamboni mechanic's blood -- Anhinga -- Madame Poirer's dog -- Flyaway -- Knives -- His brown face through the flowers -- Handsome devil -- Darlings' kingdom. ( )

These are stories of great originality that do what they want without paying much heed to narrative convention. Kathleen Winter writes with a sort of wild abandon, allowing her characters to act on impulse and refusing to wrap up her miniature dramas with tidy endings. The volume opens with three accomplished and mesmerizing "Marianne stories." Marianne Cullen is a young woman who has left the city and moved into a house in Aspel Harbour, where she is trying to write. The stories describe her encounters with neighbours and other locals in which she is subject to a bizarre proposition and learns that as an outsider unfamiliar with their traditions she will never really understand why these people do the things they do. Other stories present various sorts of miscommunications and misunderstandings and people making regrettable decisions as they try to connect with one another and with themselves. Standouts include the title story, in which two men who shared an intimate relationship as teenagers encounter one another for the first time in thirty-seven years, "You Seem a Little Bit Sad," in which Cara learns that everything she had assumed about the young man working behind the meat counter at the middle eastern grocery is wrong, and "Anhinga," in which Claire, in an attempt to assert her independence, finds herself alone and in peril and forced to accept some painful truths about herself. For the most part these are stories of the here and now, but Winter's perspective on the human condition is quirky (putting it mildly), and the reader may be forgiven for finding some of this strange and foreign. There are a couple of throwaways among the stories collected here, but all are interesting to varying degrees. Throughout the writing is lush and detailed. An enjoyable volume by the author of Annabel. ( )