Fauna Alissa York
(published by Random House Canada)
What the judges said:
"With a unique cast of characters drawn from the margins of society, Fauna vividly brings us into the hidden veins of our urban landscape's half-tamed ravines. Illuminating the resilience of the natural world in our midst, Alissa York engages us with her narrative ingenuity and the powerful poetic cadence of her refreshing and finely-crafted prose. Fauna is a tale that could only be set in Toronto — a Toronto with us every day but rarely noticed."
One day federal wildlife officer Edal Jones is able to handle humans smuggling rare creatures and killing most of them in the process; the next day she cannot. After watching a girl rescuing migratory birds that have knocked themselves out on the city's glass towers, Edal follows her to an auto-wrecker's yard in a wide ravine, and discovers a most unlikely sanctuary. Here, waifs and strays both human and animal find comfort and healing under the wing of the handsome proprietor, Guy Howell. But Guy's sanctuary is under attack from a different kind of lost soul, one on a mission to destroy the creatures that call the valley home. The characters in the novel must learn how to defy the human tendency to destroy what we don't understand, while fostering the human capacity to protect and love with not thought of return.
Alissa York
(photo by Curtis Lantinga)
Alissa York’s fiction has won the Journey Prize and the Bronwen Wallace Award, and has been published in Canada, the U.S., France, Holland and Italy. Her most recent novel, Effigy, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. York calls Toronto home.
Excerpt from Fauna
Canada Customs paged her first thing that morning. She made it to Pearson International in good time, arriving half an hour before the flight from New Delhi touched down. Anna-May Button had been flagged due to previous violations. She looked like a TV granny, a plump, apple-cheeked woman whose bags should have been crammed full of presents for the little ones back home. Instead, they were stacked with cardboard egg cartons — nine in her carry-on, twenty-four in the one she'd checked. Nearly four hundred little egg-shaped depressions, a juvenile Indian star tortoise in every one.
Those in the carry-on bag fared better: a third of them had suffocated and only two had been squashed. Those that had travelled cargo saw the worst of it. Edal opened carton after carton while the sweet-faced lady looked on. Every crushed carapace leaked colour, the cardboard soggy in places, swollen with blood.
Alissa York
Alissa York