The City Still Breathing

A dead body is found on the side of Highway 17 outside Sudbury. Naked, throat slashed, no identification. It disappears from the back of a police van and begins a strange odyssey, making its way, over the course of one early winter day, all around the northern Ontario town and through the lives of eleven very different people.

There's young Francie, who’s determined to start a modelling career and new life in the big city with Slim, her acid-dropping boyfriend, until he steals a pair of cowboy boots – and the body. There's Martha, Slim's mother, waiting tables and waiting for her husband to come back to her. There's Gordon 'The Python' Uranium, a failed hockey enforcer and owner of the cowboy boots. And there’s Jyrki Myllarinen, the local drug lord with murder on his mind.

All of them are hoping for something more out of this dying town. All they find, instead is one another, in a strange and apocalyptic moment of violence.

'Matthew Heiti is our daring designated driver, taking us to places we thought we knew but have never truly seen before, in a car full of characters we won’t soon forget. His writing is vivid, beautiful and profound.' – John K. Samson

'This is a book with brains and muscle, resonant and intense, and Matthew Heiti is a prodigious talent, the spooky bard of mullets and muffin-tops, grow-ops and stolen snakeskin boots on Highway 69.' – Mark Anthony Jarman, author of My White Planet