Longlisted for the 2017 CBC Poetry Prize, author Heather Nolan now debuts her first work of short fiction This is Agatha Falling (Pedlar Press). Wander through a dreamlike, smokey downtown St. Johns, where past and present collide.Â
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What:This is Agatha Falling (Pedlar Press, 2019)Who: Heather Nolan is a writer, musician, and photographer who lives St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. Her most recent work can be found in Viator, Newfoundland Quarterly, WORD Magazine, The Paragon, and The Overcast. She was longlisted for the 2017 CBC Poetry Prize. Her work explores connections between landscape, place, and identity.Why You Need to Read this Now:In This is Agatha Falling, Heather Nolan’s characters move through smoky downtown St. John’s bars dragging behind them longing, trauma, illness, confusion, addiction. Fragmented memory is her unreliable narrator, a conceit that amply demonstrates how the past continually interrupts the present.Her work is confident and innovative, and tackles familiar though important themes with fresh acumen. A short but mighty debut.X+Y comparisonThis is Agatha Falling is Joel Thomas Hynes meets Anais Nin, the smoky dispossession of after-hours bars where lost artists go to lick their wounds.
“Heather Nolan weaves past and present, memory and action into an elegant tapestry that cleverly conceals its full picture until the very end. This is a confident and lyrical debut penned by an author of uncommon talent.” —Sharon Bala* * *Thanks to Beth Follett at Pedlar Press for sharing This is Agatha Falling with us. For more First Fiction Friday, click here.
