Bonnie Dunlop’s new fiction collection, is an examination of the infirmity of marriages, brotherhood, friendships, parent-child relations hindered by negligence and altered by death, and where presumption is crushed by revelation — an eccentric old cowboy looks to avoid industrial pollution, a newly widowed woman attempts to untangle the secrets of her conventional marriage, a successful yet guilt-ridden man returns to his hometown for his brother’s funeral, a motherless teenage girl reconstructs her life, and a young woman struggles with the final term of her first pregnancy. All reach a precise moment when choice dictates to their unwilling spirits and when transformation begins its painful journey.
It is with such controlled transcendence that Dunlop’s characters live and that the assured writing in Carnival Glass situates award-winning author Bonnie Dunlop as a contending voice for Canadian women’s fiction.

• Shortlisted for the 2008 Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction

The fact that Bonnie Dunlop’s first short story collection possesses such power should not astonish readers who have heard her stories on CBC or read them in Canadian magazines and journals. The stories in The Beauty Box are traditional in the way they offer familiar settings, events, and characters, or the way Dunlop’s quiet voice directs our attention; however, they evolve beyond tradition in the controlled, purposeful way that Dunlop’s details are measured. Her appreciation for minutiae whether it be the meticulous attention to dress expressed by a gay bachelor, or the ritual motions of snakes in a well house create indelible moments, and lead the reader into Dunlop’s character’s fortunes. This is the debut of a distinctive and powerful new voice in Canadian short fiction.

“If these characters — with all their quirks, obsessions and secrets — were gathered together for a dinner party, I’d definitly want to be in that room. These entertaining stories deserve a wide audience . . . ” — Shelley A. Leedahl