Showing results for "Mullins" in Women's Fiction

Tom and Charlie are living out what's left of their lives on their own terms in a remote forest, two pot growers their only connection to the outside world. But then two women arrive - a photographer on the trail of survivors of a decades-ago forest fire and an elderly escapee from a psychiatric institution - and everything changes. And the Birds Rained Down, the recipient of several prizes, is a haunting meditation on aging and self-determination.

Growing up with a menacing drunk for a father and a grief-stricken mother, a girl spends her 1980s childhood staring at the television to escape the depression and looming violence that fill her suburban home. After winning a modelling competition, she dedicates herself to becoming a placid image onto which anything can be projected, a blank slate with a blank stare. Earning enough in Paris to retire in her 20s, she buys a studio in Montreal and retreats from the world, cultivating her existence as an image through her virtual reality avatar. But then her mother develops cancer.

Fleeing the city at the beginning of the pandemic, two families are cramped together in a small century-old country house. Winter seeps through the walls, the wallpaper is peeling, and mice make their nest in the piano. Without phones or internet, they turn to the outdoors, where a new language unfolds, a language of fireflies and clover. The five children explore nature and its treasures, while our narrator, Anaïs, turns to the eccentric neighbours and her own family history to find peace and meaning in the middle of her life.