Photo: Nicola Davison
“We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or to hate, to see or to be blind. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it–without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then to become the storyteller.”
Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Carol Bruneau is the author of eight books: three short fiction collections, including A Bird on Every Tree (Nimbus Publishing/Vagrant Press, 2017), and five novels, including A Circle on the Surface, new this Fall from Nimbus/Vagrant.
In its starred review Quill and Quire calls A Circle on the Surface “a quietly brilliant novel,” and 49th Shelf includes it in its most-anticipated Fall Fiction list.
Last year’s A Bird on Every Tree was a finalist for the 2017 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction, both of which her first novel, Purple for Sky, won in 2001.
Her other novels include These Good Hands (Cormorant Books, 2015) which explores the life and art of French sculptor Camille Claudel, and Glass Voices, a Globe and Mail Best Book in 2007, and book club favourite. First published by Cormorant, the novel was translated into German and released as Glasstimmen in 2010, and, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Halifax Explosion, the original was re-released by Nimbus in Spring 2018. Another earlier novel, Berth, is being re-released by Nimbus later this month.
Bruneau’s reviews, stories, essays and articles have appeared nation-wide in newspapers, journals and anthologies. A mother of three sons, she lives with her husband in Halifax, Nova Scotia.