A young couple escapes Vancouver and takes a meandering trip down to Panama. In a dreamlike tale, ambiguous in setting and period, a girl child is lost. And Charles Darwin, whose historical namesake found his life work’s inspiration in South America, finds his purpose in studying village life. Through two novellas bridged by a story, Michael Kenyon reads the imperatives of biological diversity into inner human life and asks: what happens when we do not accept parts of ourselves? what happens when genre and classification engulf “freedom” and spirit? New storytelling requires acknowledgment of the implicit paradoxes of the unconscious, journeys as much into the psyche as into the world. Kenyon’s people often find outer form in their lives through inner exploration and vice versa. This book is full of expressions of escape and commitment, knowledge and acts, introversion and extroversion, feminine and masculine.

Michael Kenyon was born in Sale, England, and has lived on the West Coast since 1967. He’s the author of eleven books of poetry and fiction. The Beautiful Children won the 2010 ReLit Award for best novel. Other work has been shortlisted for the ReLit Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Baxter Hathaway Prize (Cornell) in fiction, The Malahat Review Novella Prize, Prism international’s fiction contest (won twice), the Journey Prize, and the National and Western Magazine Awards. He has adjudicated for the Banff Centre writing program, for the BC Arts Council, and for the Saskatchewan Arts Board. He has been employed as a seaman, a diver, and a taxi driver. Presently he works as a freelance editor and a therapist, and divides his week between Pender Island and Vancouver.

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