Description

<p><b>A vibrant debut story collection about loneliness and love, privilege and poverty, addiction and isolation – the search for connection and meaning in a workaday world.</p></b>

<p>For fans of Heather O’Neill’s <i>Daydreams of Angels</i>, Ottessa Moshfegh’s <i>Homesick for Another World</i>, and Carmen Maria Machado’s <i>Her Body and Other Parties</i>, <i>Nowadays and Lonelier</i> features a cascade of characters seeking connection in the darkest alleyways and meaning in the mundane. In these pages, a ballet dancer navigates complex family ties that are frayed by addiction; a young girl discovers sex and sexuality in the nineties in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside; a lover sojourns in Egypt and exacts an unexpected revenge; and a barista and a painter weather an apartment fire in Montreal. The collection is concerned with the contrast experienced by working- and middle-class millennials, between access to education and art compared to a relative lack of access to secure jobs and housing – and how these conditions leave many straddling a world where mental health, addictions, and sex work are daily realities as they try to carve out space for themselves in times that are increasingly alienating.</p>

<p><i>Nowadays and Lonelier</i>, Carmella Gray-Cosgrove’s debut story collection, features vivid portraits of unsure yet hopeful people struggling to find a good life in a hard world.</p>