Former WFNB Competition winner publishes book
In 2008, Nova Scotia writer André Narbonne won WFNB’s David Adams Richards Prize for his fiction manuscript Separatists which, while complete, was not long—only 98 pages.
With the encouragement of the prize, he began working to expand and develop the work, which was recently published as the short story collection, Twelve Miles to Midnight.
From André:
I was very happy with what I’d written, and the DAR prize was a real boost. Still I needed something more to flesh out the main character, Derek, and to fully express the overall message of the book, which is one of tolerance in the teeth of extreme adversity. Separatists has eight stories. Twelve Miles to Midnight – the book that came from that manuscript – has twelve. (Hence the title.) I kept seven stories from the original, discarded one, and added five. The first story in the book is the one I wrote last. In it, a sick man staggers towards his front door while his wife tries to persuade him to stay.
“I can’t not work,” he tells her.
“At least take an orange,” she replies, oblivious to the fact he’s having a heart attack.
Within an hour her life and the life of her son, Derek, is overturned. The husband has died on the road, his car careering into a mother and her infant daughter, killing them. This is the kernel event in the collection, one that leads Derek and his mother to flee to Northern Ontario after Derek is the victim of a hit-and-run.
When I had that, I had my book and, happily, Black Moss Press agreed to be my publisher.
From Black Moss Press:
Critics, including one of Canada’s best writers, Nino Ricci, have had nothing but high praise for this new short story writer whose work is on the forefront of fiction in Canada today. Ricci described André Narbonne’s work as “achieving the breadth and depth of an epic.”
When Narbonne snagged the David Adams Richards Prize in 2008, the jury commented that his writing was “a cutthroat, pensive work.”
This Windsor-based author has been writing and publishing short stories in magazines all over North America for many years, but this will be his first book.
Twelve Miles to Midnight, abounds with intriguing and raw characters: a mother who flees to a wild island in Northern Ontario to protect her son from the vengeance of strangers; a mad captain on an icebound oil tanker stalked by an invisible predator; a Melvillean chef who prefers not to cook; a sex worker seeking transcendence. In twelve piercingly authentic stories, Narbonne crafts a compellingly human world in which compassion is the genius of commonplace heroes and heroines.
“Twelve Miles to Midnight feels like so much more than the sum of its parts, never straying from the small particulars of ordinary lives yet somehow achieving the breadth and depth of an epic. Narbonne writes with a rare humanity and insight, giving all his characters their due and uniquely attuned to the ties that bind them.” – Nino Ricci, author of The Origin of Species
