Fiction
ISBN-13: 978-1-990293-27-6
$18.95 CDN / $17.95 US | Trade Paperback
October 2022
The book shouldn’t exist – yet here it is.
River Black found cult success writing slasher flicks but has grown increasingly disillusioned and unhappy. When a mysterious book appears in her mailbox, her life is turned upside down. River returns to Nagano, Japan, where the book originated, hoping to pay respects to old friends and revisit her past. Instead, she finds her memory is duplicitous, her reality is porous, and the mysterious book is more alive than she could have believed. River, Diverted is a dark fairy tale that explores the trickery of memory, the delicacy of friendship, the nature of creativity and the deliverance of hope. Filled with pop culture references and a deep love of monster movies, River, Diverted is both a light-hearted and subtly serious read that will captivate readers.
Praise for River, Diverted
Sail along with frustrated screenwriter River Black as she navigates the sometimes turbulent waters of her time as an English language tutor and hostess in Nagano, Japan in the late 1990s. River’s story moves between then and twenty years later when she returns to Nagano to solve the mystery of the book that should not exist, and the death of her former employer and friend. How does the mysterious book correspond to her friend’s death, if the two events have any connection whatsoever? What do the Japanese mysteries share with the script River doesn’t want to write? Not quite whodunit and not quite procedural crime story, River, Diverted weaves River’s past and present in an engaging tale of self-discovery and assertion of her agency as a woman and writer.—Gord Grisenthwaite, author of Home Waltz, finalist for 2021 Governor General’s Award for Fiction.
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