Threshold

From the critically acclaimed, award-winning author of Brighten the Corner Where You Are, A Circle on the Surface, and Purple for Sky comes the first collection of short stories since the Thomas Raddall Award–nominated A Bird on Every Tree.

Moving from a worldly insouciance to a reckoning with privilege, the stories in Threshold explore the hypocrisies and contradictions of a world broken by racism, homelessness, and climate change. A woman’s grief causes her to see the ghost of her mother in others and in herself; an extended honeymoon cruise has a couple contemplating their gene pools, and their future; and a son’s disappearance prompts his parents to study the migratory patterns of herons.

From the piazzas of Naples and Palermo to Halifax’s urban wilderness, waterways, and backyards, Bruneau writes with characteristic empathy, humour, and linguistic precision. These luminescent stories reach beyond first-world worries toward compassion and hope, human resilience and the resiliency of nature.