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Through the nameless teenage girl protagonist, the book covers the impact of the residential school system the roles of family, ancestors, and elders high school jockeying for social position experimentation with drugs and alcohol and teenage pregnancy. The deceptively simple vignettes mix dreams, myth, and the quotidian occurrences of Nunavut life. The book combines short fiction and poetry to weave together a coming-of-age story that sometimes reads like an exceptional young girl's journal. In her debut, Inuit throat singer Tagaq turns from sounds that evoke the North to writing stories that recall the often harsh realities of life in Nunavut in the 1970s. Haunting, brooding, exhilarating, and tender all at once, Tagaq moves effortlessly between fiction and memoir, myth and reality, poetry and prose, and conjures a world and a heroine readers will never forget. Veering back and forth between the grittiest features of a small arctic town, the electrifying proximity of the world of animals, and ravishing world of myth, Tanya Tagaq explores a world where the distinctions between good and evil, animal and human, victim and transgressor, real and imagined lose their meaning, but the guiding power of love remains. When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this. She sees the spirits that surround her, and the immense power that dwarfs all of us. She knows the ravages of alcohol, and violence at the hands of those she should be able to trust. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw, amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world.

She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents' love. In the end, there may be no difference between them.Ī girl grows up in Nunavut in the 1970s. It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous.

Winner of the 2018 Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design – Prose Fictionįrom the internationally acclaimed Inuit throat singer who has dazzled and enthralled the world with music it had never heard before, a fierce, tender, heartbreaking story unlike anything you've ever read.įact can be as strange as fiction. Winner of the 2019 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Prose in English Shortlisted for the 2019 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize

Shortlisted for the 2019 Amazon First Novel Award Longlisted for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize