“Wry and full of heart” — Chatelaine
“A haunting, thrilling glimpse of the slender choices our lives hang by.”
— Nino Ricci, author of Lives of the Saints
Do you ever look back and wonder, What if?
Meet Sylvie — funny, sly, sensual and flawed. She can’t always count on herself to make good choices. She may or may not recognize a life-or-death moment, may or may not cancel her own wedding with a day to spare, might just try to walk past store security with a little something in her pocket. Like all of us, Sylvie must make decisions that have reverberations for years to come. Unlike the rest of us, Sylvie gets to live more than one life.
Is there a right path and a wrong path, or does each possibility hold its share of pleasure and pain?
Together We Read Canada selection for 2023.
“an astounding work … belongs among the year’s best.”
—University of Toronto Quarterly
Awards:
High Plains Book Award
Saskatchewan Fiction Award
John V. Hicks Award
Glengarry Shortlist in recognition of Literary Excellence
American Short Fiction, Short Story Award (ch. 2)
Leona Theis is a Canadian author whose novel-in-stories, If Sylvie Had Nine Lives, won the High Plains Book Award for Short Stories and the Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction. Her first book, Sightlines, linked stories that form a portrait of a town, won two Saskatchewan Book Awards. Excerpts from her novel The Art of Salvage, a story about messing up and finding hope, were shortlisted for novella awards on both the east and west coasts of Canada. Her personal essays have been published in literary magazines in Canada and the United States, and won creative nonfiction awards from the CBC and Prairie Fire Magazine. Her stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Journey Prize Stories, and American Short Fiction, where her work won the story prize.
Read more about Leona here .