Wait Softly Brother

From lost siblings to the horrors of war to tales of selkie wives, Wait Softly Brother is filled with questions about memory, reality and the truths hidden in family lore.

After twenty years of looping frustrations Kathryn walks out of her marriage and washes up in her childhood home determined to write her way to a new life. There she is put to work by her aging parents sorting generations of memories and mementos as biblical rains fall steadily and the house is slowly cut off from the rest of the world. Lured away from the story she is determined to write – that of her stillborn brother, Wulf – by her mother’s gift of crumbling letters, Kathryn instead begins to piece together the strange tale of an earlier ancestor, Russell Boyt, who fought as a substitute soldier in the American Civil War. As the water rises, and more truths come to the surface, the two stories begin to mingle in unexpected and beautiful ways. In this elegantly written novel Kuitenbrouwer deftly unravels the stories we are told to believe by society and shows the reader how to weave new tales of hope and possibility.

AUTHOR

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer is the bestselling author of the novels All the Broken Things, Perfecting and The Nettle Spinner. She is also the author of the story collection, Way Up. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Walrus, Maclean’s, The Lifted Brow, Significant Objects, Storyville and others. Kathryn teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Toronto.

Reviews

Celebrated Ottawa-born writer Kuitenbrouwer . . . blurs the line between fiction and autobiography in her new novel about Kathryn, a middle-aged woman who makes the devastating but necessary decision to leave her marriage and family. She escapes to her childhood home in Southern Ontario to learn more about the story of her stillborn brother, but her aging parents instead put her to work sifting through their “archive” – endless boxes with generations worth of keepsakes and photographs – in the pig shed. Family lore about an 18th-century ancestor hired for the American Civil War as a substitute soldier commingles with observations about truth, memory and reality.

– The Zoomer Book Club

Firmly and deliberately established in the realms of auto-fiction (simply put, a fictionalized autobiography, though a full definition is a wonderful rabbithole to spend an afternoon in), the novel, however, shifts almost imperceptibly into the realm of myth and folklore. Rain, for example, begins the day of Kuitenbrouwer’s arrival, and doesn’t stop for weeks, the land growing soppy, then flooding outright, isolating the house and its residents. In addition, Kuitenbrouwer’s investigation into her brother soon comes to incorporate stories of a selkie (a being who can shift between seal and human forms, by donning and shedding their skin) in the family. . . . Rich with the true stuff of imagined lives, and the imagined stuff of true lives, “Wait Softly Brother” is a glorious enchantment indeed.

– Toronto Star

“Wait Softly Brother is a suspenseful, complex and unusual work with writing both captivating and intelligent.”

– Winnipeg Free Press

“Kuitenbrouwer has written an achingly beautiful novel about a bond between a bear and a boy whose relationship embodies the Canadian desire for reunion with the wilderness. . . . Kuitenbrouwer’s writing is powerful and evocative.”
– Toronto Star on All the Broken Things

“Serious, melancholy, realist and quietly beautiful. . . . Kuitenbrouwer’s writing is careful and skilled but never showy or manipulative. By illuminating one tiny corner of the world, Kuitenbrouwer opens an almost infinite space to think about responsibility, the meaning of family and the connectedness of things.”
– National Post on All the Broken Things

“A powerful story, brilliantly told, and it surprised me from its opening page to its closing words. It’s all I want in a book, and I’m grateful that I didn’t miss it. You shouldn’t, either.”
– Edmonton Journal on Perfecting