Böcker av Heather Nolan

A breathtaking duet of spare, poetic novellas documenting the double-edged sword of self-acceptance. Heather Nolan returns with How to Be Alone, a pair of novellas that depict the euphoric highs of a Queer awakening and the crushing lows of feeling Othered in a world that isn't built for you. In this short but weighty book, Nolan explores themes such as isolation, trauma, and loss against the vibrant streets of Montreal. Here, in a city famous for bringing people together, the streets serve as a palette with a different purpose: a foil for those struggling to connect with the world around them. How to Be Alone on Boulevard Saint-Laurent follows a fragmented trail left by Kaitlin, a narrator who finds moments of astonishing absurdity and beauty in the mundane as she wanders along Boulevard Saint-Laurent. In How to Be Alone on Rue Sainte Catherine, Lev moves to the Gay Village in Montreal to escape his mother, but what he finds is not what he expected. A writer of uncommon talent, Nolan creates characters that reveal themselves through an understated confessional -- the empty spaces holding meaning as much as the worded ones.

A poetic exploration of place and belonging, a quest that takes the speaker across the ocean in search of identity and origin. The speaker in the poems that form Land of the Rock: Talamh an Carraig travels through Newfoundland and Ireland looking for meaning in words, places, and behaviour. Whether the subject is tourists on Fogo Island, conversations on Inis Oírr, flora and fauna of the Burren, or accents in Waterford, Nolan translates this sensory data into a narrative of someone seeking a sense of belonging in a lost ancestral culture. In Land of the Rock, the lost utopia of Gaelic Ireland, which is interwoven through Irish writing and consciousness, is reimagined and displaced across the Atlantic.