In the Quiet After Slaughter

They chuck bean balls in the Mexican League, join a tour group to the Orient or serve time in a Prairie prison. They nurse divorce wounds on a Caribbean isle, search for a runaway, cultivate a grow-op in the basement. The characters populating Don McLellan's debut fiction collection–young and old, male and female, from the 1940s to the present–have all passed through East Vancouver's Renfrew Heights, a housing project for returning Second World War veterans. Though their circumstances are diverse and their fates disparate, each learns that wherever one wanders in this world, the baggage that never gets lost is where one comes from.