Tunnel Island: Stories

Bill Gaston
Publisher: Thistledown Press

Book Description

Set on an island in BC’s Salish Sea, a richly imagined and often hilarious collection of linked stories by Bill Gaston, a master of the art of short fiction.

Eleven stories feature a cast of characters striving to overcome pasts that often include a catastrophic error. On Tunnel Island, moral misjudgments, semi-legal schemes, and antisocial gaffes abound as characters seek a remedy for what ails them: loneliness, heartbreak, grief.

Jack ekes out a living doing odd jobs and minding the estates of absent owners, until he takes a lover’s bad advice and rents their houses through Airbnb. A dying woman retains her wry Wiccan sense of humour while lovingly ministered to by her partner — in between his trips to hand out Halloween candy at their door. The almost mystical disappearance of a toddler is revisited years later when her parents remarry in a surreal outdoor ceremony.

Highly original and empathetic, Tunnel Island is electrified by dark undercurrents that jolt and illuminate by turns. Bill Gaston’s bighearted vision of life on a heavily forested island immerses readers in a world rendered tender and tolerable by human folly and our stumbling attempts at redemption.

Author Bio

Bill Gaston is the author of seven novels and eight collections of short fiction, including Sex is Red and Mount Appetite, as well as a book of poems and two memoirs, most recently Just Let Me Look at You. His work has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Giller Prize, among many other awards, and has won the Victoria/Butler Book Prize, the Writers’ Trust Timothy Findley Award (for a body of work, mid-career), the Ethel Wilson Prize for Fiction, and the National Post Book of the Year. He lives on Gabriola island Island with his wife, the author Dede Crane.