We All Need To Eat

Finalist for the 2020 Western Canada Jewish Book Awards, The Nancy Richler Memorial Prize for Fiction

Finalist for the 2020 Kobzar Book Award

Finalist for the 2019 Ethel Wilson Fiction Award

We All Need to Eat is a new collection of linked stories from award-winning author Alex Leslie that revolve around Soma, a young Queer woman in Vancouver, chronicling her attempts to come to grips with herself, her family and her sexuality.

Set in different moments falling between Soma’s childhood and her late thirties, each story–bold and varying in its approach to narrative–presents a sea change in Soma’s life, from Soma becoming addicted to weightlifting while going through a break-up in her thirties; to her complex relationship with her younger brother after she leaves home revealed over the course of a long family chicken dinner; to Soma’s struggles to cope with her mother’s increasing instability by becoming fixated on buying her a lamp for seasonal affective disorder; and the far-reaching impact and lasting reverberations of Soma’s family’s experience of the Holocaust as it scrapes up against the rise of Alt Right media. Lyrical, gritty and atmospheric, Soma’s stories refuse to shy away from the contradictions inherent to human experience, exploring one young person’s journey through mourning, escapism, and the search for nourishment.

AUTHOR

Alex Leslie

Alex Leslie is from Vancouver. Her chapbook of microfictions Twenty Objects For The New World was published by Nomados Press. Leslie’s writing has been published in many Canadian literary journals and in the Best Canadian Stories anthology series (Oberon Press). She has won a Gold National Magazine Award for personal journalism and a CBC Literary Award for fiction.

Reviews

Praise for We All Need To Eat:

We All Need to Eat is a stunning inquiry into the sharpness of the world as it collides with the fragility–the ambiguities and possibilities–of the self. Alex Leslie a tremendously gifted and compassionate writer. This bold and searing collection is a wonder. –Madeleine Thien, Scotiabank Giller Prize winning author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“Alex Leslie has written a refreshing set of interlocking narratives about family and heartache. A far cry from the self-discovery credos of the millennial age, her protagonist Soma ruminates and broods. And with Soma’s painfully careful and wonderfully-crafted considerations, the reader might also weigh the many small, trying moments that connect us to chosen and blood family.” —Amber Dawn, author of Sodom Road Exit