Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
WINNER OF THE QWF FIRST BOOK PRIZE
“Alice Petersen writes as eloquently about the natural world as she does about the world of human emotion and desire. This is a wise and impressive collection of stories.”—David Bezmozgis, author of The Free World
Alice Petersen's All the Voices Cry is masterful and potent—incredibly satisfying for a reader.
— Kathleen Winter, author of Annabel
An academic’s wife, struggling to keep up with her husband’s quest to find a long-dead author’s Tahitian love-garden, realizes that her own idea of paradise no longer includes her husband. An architect dreams of slender redheads, Champlain’s astrolabe, and a brush with mortality—and finds at least the latter at Danseuses 7 Jours. An elderly man boards a trans-Pacific flight in an attempt to elude the prediction of a psychic, only to understand too late how the prophecy has shaped his actions.
In All the Voices Cry, modern life collides with all the old pushes and pulls: city and country, the global and the local, the ideal and the real. Petersen’s characters chase the mirage of escape, and are brought up hard by reality. This is a book rooted in landscape, tangled in the brambles of personal history, and it introduces in Alice Petersen a wondrous new voice that is yours to discover.
Alice Petersen is a writer and critic whose work has been shortlisted for numerous Canadian prizes and awards. She was born in New Zealand and now lives and works in Montreal, Quebec.
"Finely crafted and pared down to their bare essentials … These are stories that work on multiple levels, and continue to divulge their secrets after several rereadings."—Quill & Quire
"Among the book’s pleasures are bursts of descriptive panache."—Globe and Mail
"All the Voices Cry has to be counted one of the most assured short story debuts in recent years."—goodreports.net
"Alice Petersen writes as eloquently about the natural world as she does about the world of human emotion and desire. This is a wise and impressive collection of stories."—David Bezmozgis, author of The Free World
"Alice Petersen's All the Voices Cry is masterful and potent—incredibly satisfying for a reader."—Kathleen Winter, author of Annabel
"The story is balanced between this sense of nostalgia and acceptance, and sustained by the narrator's charming voice and her gift for physical description."—David Bezmozgis, on "After Summer"
"These stories are lively, immediate ... the metaphorical eye and the ear for voice are strong here."—David Adams Richards Prize, Winner's Citation (2009)
"All the Voices Cry announces itself early on as something of a gift...The authorial voice, far from being elusive, is sharply, poetically present." — Landfall
Alice Petersen is a writer and critic whose work has been shortlisted for the Journey Prize, the Canada Broadcast Corporation Literary Awards, and the Writers' Union of Canada Short Story Competition. She was born in New Zealand and now lives and works in Montréal.
After Summer 4
Among the Trees 9
Salsa Madre 20
Champlain’s Astrolabe 26
All the Voices Cry 35
To Catch a Fish 41
The Tenured Heart 47
Vandals in Sandals 56
Where the Corpse Weed Grows 61
The Frog 70
Mrs Viebert’s Prognostication 80
Neither Up Nor Down 90
Through the Gates 100
The Land Below 107
Neptune’s Necklace 119
Scottish Annie 128