"If Colette Maitland were a musician, you'd say she had perfect
pitch.--Isabel Huggan
A soldier's wife struggles to reconnect with her daughter after her
husband is killed overseas. A baby abandoned at the rectory door
inflames a town with gossip. A dog is shot. A heart attack survivor
perplexes his family with a newfound sense of religious euphoria, while
a nursing home volunteer struggles with the bad behaviour of one of her
veteran patients. Compassionate, clear-eyed, probing grief and
insularity, Colette Maitland's short fiction debut shows us the price of
keeping the peace in a small town.
"Colette Maitland writes like a dream, with a touch that's compellingly
subtle--almost deceptively so, since in these stories, danger lurks
around every corner, and trouble is resolved in the most surprising and
unsentimental ways. By the end I felt I'd experienced a literary
sleight-of-hand. I had to double-check that I was reading a debut
collection and not the latest in a series of Maitland's wise and lovely
books."--Charlotte Gill
Here are the stories you didn't know about the people you do know, and
about strangers too, those people you pass on the street without giving
them a second thought. Colette Maitland has the inside track on the
abiding truth that it is our stories that make us human, for better or
worse. Keeping the Peace is a superb debut collection by a writer to
watch.--Diane Schoemperlen
"These residents of Tim Horton's Nation struggle with illness, death and
depression and hang on as best they can with true grit. Raymond Carver
meets Norman Levine on these pages, which herald the appearance of a
fine new writer of everyday realism."--Antanas Sileika
Colette Maitland is the winner of a Kingston Literary Award, the
WFNB Literary Competition, and the "Ten Stories High" Short Story
Competition.
