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First Fiction Fridays: Dear Leaves, I Miss You All by Sara Heinonen
Sara Heinonen’s first book of stories is populated with characters forced to confront unusual circumstances and hostile environments. When disappointment or disaster loom, they look to nature for solace, but sometimes nature itself is the threat. This is fiction that is fascinated with the moments when life gets both stranger and more beautiful.
What:
Dear Leaves, I Miss You All (Mansfield Press, 2013)
Who:
Sara Heinonen’s fiction has appeared in the Canadian literary magazines Grain, Event, The Fiddlehead, Taddle Creek, This Magazine, The New Quarterly, and The Dalhousie Review.
In addition to writing, Sara works as a landscape architect. She lives in Toronto.
Why you need to read this now:
A workaholic sees the natural world with new eyes when her former colleague succumbs to a botanical affliction. Three teenagers try to sort out their friendships and their looming adulthood while their parents behave like teenagers. A Chinese immigrant struggles to accept his daughter’s developing sexuality as he copes with life in Canada and the loss of his wife. A driving instructor falls for his student and then for her obsession with Glenn Gould. A neurotic environmentalist hides behind the laundry boxes in her local superstore.
Sara Heinonen’s first book of stories is populated with characters forced to confront unusual circumstances and hostile environments. When disappointment or disaster loom, they look to nature for solace, but sometimes nature itself is the threat. This is fiction that is fascinated with the moments when life gets both stranger and more beautiful.
What other people are saying about Dear Leaves, I Miss You All:
“The sweetly earnest and anxious characters in these wonderfully wry stories give me hope for the future. The bad news is, the world is ending. The good news is, Sara Heinonen’s poultry-scented apocalypse comes with bouncy castles.”
—Jessica Westhead, author of And Also Sharks
“For all their queerness, levity and respect for quiet moments, there’s the ambient eeriness of coming disaster throughout these stories. It’s fixing to storm big in Dear Leaves, I Miss You All and the human animals on the cusp of it are acting weird. Love—but don’t be fooled by the daffiness or daftness of—Heinonen’s wonderful characters. Their charming quirks are hints of something devastating about to hit.”—Andrew Hood, author of The Cloaca
*****
Thank you to Mansfield Press for sharing this great new collection of stories with us. You can check out more about Sara and her work on The New Quarterly blog and the Bookshelf blog.
_______Edited from the original post, published on the LPG blog
