Happy book birthday to Megan Gail Coles‘ SMALL GAME HUNTING AT THE LOCAL COWARD GUN CLUB, publishing today with House of Anansi Press!
By turns biting, funny, poetic, and heartbreaking, Megan Gail Coles’ debut novel rips into the inner lives of a wicked cast of characters, building towards a climax that will shred perceptions and force a reckoning. This is blistering Newfoundland Gothic for the twenty-first century, a wholly original, bracing, and timely portrait of a place in the throes of enormous change, where two women confront the traumas of their past in an attempt to overcome the present and to pick up a future.
MEGAN GAIL COLES is a graduate of the Memorial University of Newfoundland and the National Theatre School of Canada and is completing an MFA at the University of British Columbia. She has completed numerous plays, and her first fiction collection of short stories, Eating Habits of the Chronically Lonesome, won the BMO Winterset Award, the ReLit Award, and the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award and earned her the one-time Writers’ Trust 5×5 prize. Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club is her first novel. Originally from Savage Cove on the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, Megan now resides in St. John’s, where she is the Executive Director of Riddle Fence and Projects Manager at Eastern Edge Gallery.
Advance Praise
“Small Game Hunting is a singular, beautiful, burning story — not only a piercing page-turner but a sharp and essential portrait of an island and its people in our times that will draw you in and then pull you under. It is an ocean of a book. Not to be missed.”
— Elisabeth de Mariaffi, author of Hysteria
“No mistake, Megan Gail Coles is a driven, consequential writer who plays for keeps. Her seemingly off-the-cuff voice is controlled and quite intricate, and commands revisiting. Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club is as important a novel as any that’s hit Canadian literature in years.”
— Joel Thomas Hynes, author of We’ll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night
“Each character is rendered with such stunning details and unflinching insights that you can’t leave this novel’s pages without being changed. To read Megan Gail Coles’s masterful debut is to become obsessed with it.”
— Alicia Elliott, author of A Mind Spread Out on the Ground