Happy book birthday to Claire Tacon whose sophomore novel IN SEARCH OF THE PERFECT SINGING FLAMINGO publishes today with Wolsak and Wynn!

IN SEARCH OF THE PERFECT SINGING FLAMINGO, is equally heart-warming as it is heart-breaking. This novel is ultimately the story of a father, struggling to let his daughters grow up, and of a working class family, struggling against hard odds, to take care of each other when the world lets them down.

Claire Tacon’s first novel, In the Field, was the winner of the 2010 Metcalf-Rooke Award. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Bronwen Wallace Award, the CBC Literary Prizes and the Playboy College Fiction Contest, and has appeared in journals and anthologies such as the New Quarterly, SubTerrain and Best Canadian Short Stories. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and is a past fiction editor of PRISM international. Claire is a lecturer at St. Jerome’s University and runs the fiction podcast The Oddments Tray with Chioke I’Anson.

Pre-publication Praise:
“Hilarious and humane, uproarious and unpredictable, Claire Tacon’s In Search of the Perfect Singing Flamingo hums with infectious power. Imagine George Saunders and Meg Wolitzer co-authored a book about a Chuck E. Cheese franchise in North York, only then might you get some idea of what Claire Tacon has accomplished here. It’s a story about regret, siblinghood, parenthood, fertility, nostalgia and disappointment, which is perhaps just a long way of saying: it’s a story about a family.”
– Michael Christie, author of If I Fall, If I Die

“Written with humour and grace, In Search of the Perfect Singing Flamingo centres on Henry Robinson, a father struggling to be his best in his relationship with his daughters, a father learning to hold on tighter and to let go in equal measure. Add to that a funhouse and a road trip and a cast of characters you won’t soon forget, and you have a novel that manages to be clever and funny and wrenching and captivating all at once. Tacon’s writing is full of quiet magic, mixing the ordinary with the extraordinary as only great fiction can do. I couldn’t put it down until I’d reached its final page.”
– Amy Stuart, author of Still Mine

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