A novel of small graceful moments of epiphany fleeting happenstance connections like the plaintive sound of a trumpet in the dark A wonderful and promising debutToronto Star

An entrancing debut novelThe Globe and Mail

Dunics gentle prose attentiveness and keen attention to detail is evident throughout this quiet and melancholy narrative both in its fewandfarbetween moments of notquite happiness and acceptance and in its much more frequent moments of longing and despair It is easy to see why her writing has been so well received and so well judged across the country and it is exciting to imagine who and what she will create in the years to comeSharon ChisvinWinnipeg Free Press

With her beautiful debut novel Nina Dunic takes a cleareyed look at the ways we try to fool ourselves Siblings Stasi and Peter shared a difficult and disjointed childhood but theyve taken divergent paths as adults Stasi a restless and driven wife mother and notquite executive strives to make the world bend to her will while Peter a wouldbe professional trumpet player bends for everything and everyone all too easily Alternating between her two protagonists points of view Dunic gives us heartbreaking insight into the inner monologues that nag at both characters as they each try to skirt past the deeper issues that are too painful to acknowledge Both tragic and relatableThe Clarionis an intimate portrait of two people who are keenly aware of their flaws even if they dont have the courage to confront themApple Books

The spare prose in this book is the perfect example of why less is more it gives us a snapshot into two peoples lives offered alongside descriptive writing that forces you to slow down and consider the words chosen and the meaning behind themAnne Logan Ive Read This and CBCs The Homestretch

An extraordinary debut with the courage to recognize and reckon with the essential solitude of our moment a rare novel that is willing to look unflinchingly at our isolation and that in doing this fulfils the promise of fiction to make us less aloneAaron Schneider author of The Supply Chain

With a unique sensitivity Nina Dunic shares with us the hopefulness and solitude of being an introspective thinker Her characters Peter and Stasi speak to the universality of loneliness through the disenchanting particulars of their own Beautiful and devastatingThe Miramichi Reader

The Clarions split narrative of a brother and sister adrift is as darkly comic as it is precise Dunic is able to distill what it means to be alone with a single line or look or colour of the sky Theres a felt pressure below every one of this novels cloistered fragments a quiet below the characters inexorable getting by that so many of us recognize and it breaks your heart Here is an exciting new voice in fictionJason Jobin author of The Wild Mandrake

In The Clarion the lives of Dunics sibling protagonists run parallel propelled by the constant tension between performance and introspection that can come to define us as peopleboth who we are and also who we fail to beCurtis LeBlanc author of Sunsetter