Böcker av Robert McGill

With an intimate, comic, and compassionate eye, the twelve stories in Simple Creatures consider what it means to live with less in the twenty-first century. In this debut collection, featuring stories set in locations from the Pacific Northwest and upstate New York to the English coast, Robert McGill explores the heartaches and joys of people who are desperate to uncomplicate their complicated world. Through stories consisting of YouTube monologues, pet-care instructions, school reports, and the unspoken thoughts of a young scholar obsessed by Alice Munro, Simple Creatures also shows us the sometimes hilarious, often poignant ways in which our use of language shapes our relationships with others and ourselves. Along the way, we meet a teenager who wants to live among a community of Bigfoot that he claims to have discovered in the woods; the widow of a famous endocrinologist after she gains custody of a chimpanzee from his lab; a boy whose fledgling hockey career is troubled by the fact that his name is Peter Gretzky; and a divorcee seeking out the mysterious author of a viral environmental pledge. Through their lives, Simple Creatures offers an acute, sympathetic portrait of our time.

A bold and absurd new take on the dystopian plague novel, where people are treated like IKEA furniture Distraught and hopeless, an eighteen-year-old distance runner, Regan, decides to end her life. And she''ll do it through an unusual new method available only on the dark web. Enter Ülle, a woman with amnesia, who will, inadvertently, make Regan''s wish come true. But Ülle begins to remember her past and the outrageous steps her government took to combat a deadly pandemic of parasitic infections, which have brought her to this new country and to Regan''s house. Meanwhile, Regan might be changing her mind, and she finds herself more and more concerned about keeping both Ülle and herself alive. But the shadowy organization that brought them together wants to keep them both quiet - permanently. A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life is a darkly comic dystopian tale that probes our anxieties around boundaries, whether territorial or bodily, and our fraught desire not to die alone."Gripping from the first page, Robert McGill''s A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life is a dark, speculative novel with echoes of The Handmaid''s Tale, set against the backdrop of a plague. Some of us would do anything to survive, down to flatpacking ourselves like IKEA furniture, while others would do anything to make our miserable lives end. This is timely, provocative, ethically challenging fiction that asks whether the drive to survive is stronger than the inevitability of death." -Ian Williams, author of Reproduction"Terrifying and tender, A Suitable Companion''s sci-fi angle serves to frame a fascinating parable about the post-post-modern family. Unpredictable and completely original, this is a propulsive, rewarding, and thought-provoking read." -Michael Redhill, author of Bellevue Square ​​"The guy knows what he''s doing, from missing children to silk parachutes, you are never lost and he will catch you." - Zadie Smith, author of NW "A storyteller who refuses to keep things straight, and for this produces freshly captivating effects." - Andrew Pyper, author of The Demonologist "A writer of striking talent and originality." - Daily Mail on The Mysteries "McGill is a talented writer, adept at expressing the nuanced, unspoken truths that beg the lies by which we live." - Observer on The Mysteries

Robert, a young traveller, finds himself in the small Ontario town of Sunshine, in the middle of a party at the town's wildlife park. The mystery of Alice's disappearance slowly unravels, at the same time revealing the dark and murky secrets of the inhabitants of Sunshine.