By turns savage, biting, funny, poetic, and heartbreaking, Megan Gail Coles’s debut novel rips into the inner lives of a wicked cast of characters, exposing class, gender, and racial tensions over the course of one Valentine’s Day in the dead of a winter storm.
Valentine’s Day, the longest day of the year.
A fierce blizzard is threatening to tear a strip off the city, while inside The Hazel restaurant a storm system of sex, betrayal, addiction, and hurt is breaking overhead. Iris, a young hostess, is forced to pull a double despite resolving to avoid the charming chef and his wealthy restaurateur wife. Just tables over, Damian, a hungover and self-loathing server, is trying to navigate a potential punch-up with a pair of lit customers who remain oblivious to the rising temperature in the dining room. Meanwhile Olive, a young woman far from her northern home, watches it all unfurl from the fast and frozen street.
Through rolling blackouts, we glimpse the truth behind the shroud of scathing lies and unrelenting abuse, and discover that resilience proves most enduring in the dead of this winter’s tale.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Valentine’s Day, the longest day of the year.
A fierce blizzard is threatening to tear a strip off the city, while inside The Hazel restaurant a storm system of sex, betrayal, addiction, and hurt is breaking overhead. Iris, a young hostess, is forced to pull a double despite resolving to avoid the charming chef and his wealthy restaurateur wife. Just tables over, Damian, a hungover and self-loathing server, is trying to navigate a potential punch-up with a pair of lit customers who remain oblivious to the rising temperature in the dining room. Meanwhile Olive, a young woman far from her northern home, watches it all unfurl from the fast and frozen street.
Through rolling blackouts, we glimpse the truth behind the shroud of scathing lies and unrelenting abuse, and discover that resilience proves most enduring in the dead of this winter’s tale.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"No mistake, Megan Gail Coles is a driven, consequential writer who plays for keeps. Her seemingly off-the-cuff voice is controlled and quite intricate, and commands revisiting. Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club is as important a novel as any that’s hit Canadian literature in years." - Joel Thomas Hynes
"Small Game Hunting is a singular, beautiful, burning story — not only a piercing page-turner but a sharp and essential portrait of an island and its people in our times that will draw you in and then pull you under. It is an ocean of a book. Not to be missed." - Elisabeth de Mariaffi
"Small Game Hunting is a singular, beautiful, burning story — not only a piercing page-turner but a sharp and essential portrait of an island and its people in our times that will draw you in and then pull you under. It is an ocean of a book. Not to be missed." - Elisabeth de Mariaffi
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