Danuta Gleed Literary Award finalist

City of Victoria Butler Book Prize finalist

Intensely imaginative and darkly emotional, the weird and wonderful stories in Double Dutch deftly alternate between fantasy and reality, transporting readers into strange worlds that are at once both familiar and uncanny — where animals are more human, and people more mysterious, than they first appear.

Shape-shifters, doppelgangers, and spirits inhabit the extraordinary worlds depicted in Trunkey’s stories: a single mother believes her toddler is the reincarnation of a terrorist; Ronald Reagan’s body double falls in love with the first lady; a man grieves for his wife after a bear takes over her body. The collection also includes moving tales grounded in painful and touching reality: a young deaf girl visits Niagara Falls before she goes blind; an elephant named Topsy is killed on Coney Island by Thomas Edison in 1903; and a woman learns the truth about her son’s disappearance while searching with her husband in the Canadian Rockies.

This enchanting and, at times, heartbreaking debut collection of stories hails the arrival of an exceptional new literary talent.

Laura Trunkey’s fiction has been published in journals and magazines across Canada, and was included in the anthology Darwin’s Bastards: Astounding Tales from Tomorrow. Her non-fiction has garnered two honorable mentions at the National Magazine Awards. She is the author of one children’s novel, The Incredibly Ordinary Danny Chandelier (2008), which was published by Annick Press.

Laura Trunkey's profile page

• Short-listed, City of Victoria Butler Book Prize

…a confident debut collection…

Quill and Quire

Beautifully bizarre … wickedly creative …these stories are strange and beautiful, imaginative and unafraid of emotion.

W Dish Network

…a suite of unexpected stories…Trunkey achieves a coherent marriage of elements in these tales: History, realism, and the mystical combine to strong and startling effect.

Globe and Mail

…accomplished excursions into the weird and offbeat.

Toronto Star

Elegant, deft, light of touch, and sometimes spicily comic …[This] debut story collection is a marvel of style and substance.

Vancouver Sun

…clever and jaunty…

Winnipeg Free Press