Interference
A Novel
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- US$11.99
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"An immaculately constructed page-turner that is also, miraculously, a redemptive meditation on loneliness and community" (Carrie Snyder, author of Girl Runner).
The inhabitants of Edgewood Drive in the small Canadian town of Parkville seem to live simple, peaceful lives, but as the children attend elementary school and the senior ladies play Leisure League hockey, secrets and hardships and menaces lurk not far from the surface. This suspenseful novel takes us into a community and reveals the life and happiness—as well as the fear and sorrow—of those who call it home.
"Interference is a terrific page-turner, but it's also a haunting, powerful look at the way families and friendships entangle us all. Berry is a sharp-eyed, engaging writer, and she deftly captures the terrors, ruptures and intimacies of one seemingly ordinary neighborhood, always finding a precarious beauty in her characters' lives. This is a book that is terrifying, startling, and very hard to put down." —Rebecca Godfrey, author of Under the Bridge
"Interference is tightly plotted and neatly executed, very nearly perfectly paced, and satisfyingly complex—but it is also escapism in its purest form, and a sheer delight to read." —The Winnipeg Review
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In her fifth novel, Berry plays literary voyeur, peeling back the polite veneer of the middle-class to expose a chaotic underbelly. Weaving myriad narratives into an impressive whole, the book submits that a community is actually an arena of unfocused fear. Tom, living in a world where "it's rare to even see a wheelchair," worries that a disfigured transient helping bag his leaves is a potential threat. Twelve-year-old Becky is a germaphobe haunted by a boy no one else sees. Claire struggles through cancer recovery while husband Ralph experiences bouts of extreme forgetfulness, hoping that "everything he forgets now will not matter. Ever." Berry waltzes these and other characters towards a hinted-at climax of danger and resolution, making it clear that paranoia, whether real or imagined, is a core aspect of the human condition, one that we not only cannot avoid but sometimes actively cultivate. Near its end, Claire comes to believe "that this is what cancer does to you, that this is what growing older does to you, that this is what life does to you it slowly robs you of something to look forward to." Perhaps so, but this novel, with its dark-humoured glimpse behind neighbourhood doors, is something to look forward to.
