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Dundurn Press is excited to announce that two of its books have been nominated for the Ontario Library Association’s Forest of Reading program. The Jigsaw Puzzle King by Gina McMurchy-Barber has been nominated for the Forest of Reading Silver Birch Award 2021 and Christina Kilbourne’s Safe Harbour has been nominated for the Forest of Reading Red Maple Award 2021!

I’m kind of over dystopian stories.

There, I finally said it. I read 1984 and Brave New World and The Giver when I was young. I’ve read a lot more since then, bookshelves full of destruction and disaster. But here’s my problem with a lot of dystopias: they warn us that the future could be bad. That the apocalypse—environmental, nuclear, viral, the super-patriarchy—is coming if we don’t change our behaviour right now.

But what if we’re already living in the apocalypse?

Jennifer McCartney’s wonderful review of BOY, a sensitive meditation on my novel as a reflection of the stressful pause that COVID-19 has imposed on our lives, has followed me to Ottawa. This is a city not quite in motion, and McCartney’s observations seem particularly apt as I stroll around the downtown with my daughters, Alida, 4, and Nora, 7.