All the Voices Cry

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.