What is Going to Happen Next

Winner of the Book Design Award at the 2018 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!

Karen Hofmann’s empathetic and cathartic novel, What is Going to Happen Next, pieces together the lives of five members of the Lund family following their enforced dispersal after the death of the father and the hospitalization of the mother in the remote West Coast community of Butterfly Lake. It explores their self-doubts and aspirations in the ways they cope with their separation and reunion through their work and personal relationships, and reveals the ways in which their past is filtered through memory and desire. It also skillfully exposes a Vancouver class system from the perspectives of diverse socio-economic conditions and lifestyles.

What is Going to Happen Next is character-driven and well-wrought, with a tenderness that propels the reader forward alongside the Lunds who are learning to fuse together as a chosen family.

AUTHOR

Karen Hofmann

Karen Hofmann lives in Kamloops, B.C. She has been published in Arc, Prairie Fire, The Malahat Review, and The Fiddlehead. Her book Water Strider was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Prize at the 2009 BC Book Awards, and “The Burgess Shale” was shortlisted at the 2012 CBC Short Fiction Contest. Her first novel After Alice was released in Spring 2014.

Reviews

Praise for What is Going to Happen Next:

“An incisive and deeply satisfying novel about the muscle memory of the human heart.”
~ Sarah Mian, author of When the Saints

“Karen Hofmann’s What is Going to Happen Next is not another gloomy Can-Lit family saga but a familiar portrait of our neighbours and friends–maybe of ourselves–weathering the effects of far distant adversity with the same halting, human grace we all share.”
~ Jennifer Quist, author of Sistering

“A compassionate and insightful novel about siblings and the bonds they forge. Hofmann interweaves their stories with assurance, rich detail, and heart.”
~ Alice Zorn, author of Five Roses

“It’s a novel that’s as original as it is ambitious, and it works, resulting in an all-engrossing visceral reading experience, and I’m recommending it to everyone.”
~ Kerry Clare, Pickle Me This

“As a family saga, the novel is empathetic, compassionate, and expertly paced.”
~ Brenda Johnston, Canadian Literature