All the Voices Cry
Language: English
Pages: 160
ISBN: 1926845528
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“Alice Petersen writes as eloquently about the natural world as she does about the world of human emotion and desire. This is a wise and impressive collection of stories.”—David Bezmozgis, author of The Free World
Alice Petersen's All the Voices Cry is masterful and potent—incredibly satisfying for a reader.
— Kathleen Winter, author of Annabel
An academic’s wife, struggling to keep up with her husband’s quest to find a long-dead author’s Tahitian love-garden, realizes that her own idea of paradise no longer includes her husband. An architect dreams of slender redheads, Champlain’s astrolabe, and a brush with mortality—and finds at least the latter at Danseuses 7 Jours. An elderly man boards a trans-Pacific flight in an attempt to elude the prediction of a psychic, only to understand too late how the prophecy has shaped his actions.
In All the Voices Cry, modern life collides with all the old pushes and pulls: city and country, the global and the local, the ideal and the real. Petersen’s characters chase the mirage of escape, and are brought up hard by reality. This is a book rooted in landscape, tangled in the brambles of personal history, and it introduces in Alice Petersen a wondrous new voice that is yours to discover.
Alice Petersen is a writer and critic whose work has been shortlisted for numerous Canadian prizes and awards. She was born in New Zealand and now lives and works in Montreal, Quebec.
at him, fascinated. He was one of those men who do not know the difference between a dress and a skirt. “What else?” he asked. “Sheep sorrel,” she said. “Look beside your car at le parking. Small flower, red. Next?” “Some kind of rhubarb.” “So is it the Indian rhubarb (Rheum officinale) or the Turkish rhubarb (Rheum palmatum)?” “I don’t know,” said Isabella. “Listen to me, mademoiselle: order it off the internet,” said Pascal. “I just thought it would be more natural to make it. It’s
Norman’s hands, but the words written on it remained unchanged: Mrs Viebert’s Prognostication. For the hundredth, perhaps the two-hundredth time in his life he opened the envelope and pulled out the playing card inside it. As he always did, he looked first at the picture on the back of the card: a swooning gypsy-wild, sky-tumbled Icarus, succoured by lonely mermaids whose dark auburn hair, so tastefully arranged, had stimulated his earliest adolescent fantasies. Now Norman wondered how any artist
obvious discomfort at having his trousers rolled up, he would have quoted somebody, and she would have thrown a piece of seaweed at him or threatened him with a crab. Now Penelope was glad that she would never find the sea cave, so that she would not have to hear the quotation with which Charles would adorn the view. Charles’s mouth was a sea cave, with words rushing in and out of it, flecked with foam. Charles hit the steering wheel with the flat of his hand, gleeful and shouting over the
their necks, linked tennis shoes dangling from their wrists, slowed down with baskets of iced buns and fruit, spare sunhats, seaweed strands and shells. Hattie remembered that the mothers had been discussing varieties of cooking apple. She poked at the fire. The grate was small and it never gave off a great deal of heat, but the colour always warmed her, as did the bronze velvet curtain that screened off her bedroom. Absently she looked out the window. At the time, she really had been very good
out of the rain.” She held the door open for them. They wiped their sandy shoes on the mat and came into the galley kitchen, glancing around at the low slanted ceiling, taking in the cracked enamelled sink and the leaking tap. There was sand on the backs of their necks from where they had been lying in the sea grass before it began to rain. The boy dropped the wet jumper on the floor by the door. “I’ll just leave these here.” The girl had picked up a bunch of sea tulips attached to a mussel