Description

WINNER OF THE 2023 BC AND YUKON ETHEL WILSON PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE
NATIONAL BESTSELLER

An urgent first novel about breaching the prisons we live inside from one of Canadas most daring literary talents

An unnamed narrator abandons his unfinished thesis and returns to northern Alberta in search of what eludes him the shape of the novel he yearns to write an autobiography of his rural hometown the answers to existential questions about family love and happiness

What ensues is a series of conversations connections and disconnections that reveals the texture of life in a town literature has left unexplored where the friction between possibility and constraint provides an insistent background score

Whether hes meeting with an auntie distraught over the imprisonment of her grandson engaging in rez gossip with his cousin at a pow wow or lingering in bed with a married man after a hotel room hookup the narrator makes space for those in his orbit to divulge their private joys and miseries testing the theory that storytelling can make us feel less lonely

Populated by characters as alive and vast as the boreal forest and culminating in a breathtaking crescendo A Minor Chorus is a novel about how deeply entangled the sayable and unsayable can becomeand about how ordinary life when pressed can produce hauntingly beautiful music