Skin
Now, for the first time, a blistering book of short fiction from one of Canada’s most loved novelists.
In Skin, Catherine Bush plunges into the vortex of all that shapes us. Summoning relationships between the human and more-than-human, she explores a world where touch and intimacy are both desirable and fraught.
Ranging from the realistic to the speculative, Bush’s stories tackle the condition of our restless, unruly world amidst the tumult of viruses, climate change, and ecological crises. Here, she brings to life unusual and perplexing intimacies: a man falls in love with the wind; a substitute teacher’s behaviour with a student brings unforeseen risks; a woman becomes fixated on offering foot washes to strangers.
Bold, vital, and unmistakably of the moment, Skin gives a charged and animating voice to the question of how we face the world and how, in the process, we discover tenderness and allow ourselves to be transformed.
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“Catherine Bush asks the most daring question, How do we connect? Not only with those close to us, but with strangers, the natural world, and a climate crisis. The characters in these stories make a bold reach across a void — I loved what I found on the other side, a collection that is incredibly tender, tumultuous, and touching.” — Claire Cameron, author of The Last Neanderthal
“Skin is an intimate collection of stories that reveal people at their most vulnerable and their most dangerous. Subtle, stinging, and beautifully observed, the title story still has its grip on my heart.” — Tessa McWatt, author of The Snow Line
“Deftly woven through a thematic tapestry of surfaces and skin, these stories are memorable, riveting, and seismic. Catherine Bush pens tender anthems of verboten intimacy and familial survival, earth and flesh and glacial being. These expertly crafted stories are held together by exquisite narrative tensions, each a precious, rare jewel. This book will make you rethink this world, peel back its many skins.” — David Huebert, author of Oil People
“Skin dives under the surface of relationships, revealing hidden streams of desire, longing, pain, and deliverance. In successive stories that are penetrating and absorbing, Catherine Bush also explores how we are deepening our love affair, in this time of climate storms and glacier melt, with the more-than-human world. A mysterious tenderness animates these stories. They ache for what we love. A brave and haunting book.” — Shaena Lambert, author of Petra
Catherine Bush is the author of five novels. Her work has been critically acclaimed, published internationally, and shortlisted for numerous awards. Her most recent novel, Blaze Island, was a Globe and Mail and Writers’ Trust of Canada Best Book of the Year, and the Hamilton Reads 2021 Selection. Her other novels include the Canada Reads longlisted Accusation; the Trillium Award shortlisted Claire's Head; the national bestselling The Rules of Engagement, which was also named a New York Times Notable Book and a L.A. Times Best Book of the Year; and Minus Time, shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Award. The recipient of numerous fellowships, Bush has been Writer-in-Residence/Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich and a Fiction Meets Science Fellow at the HWK in Delmenhorst, Germany. An Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, she lives in Toronto and in an old schoolhouse in Eastern Ontario.
