Elaine McCluskey writes about the people you might find in the corners of life: boxers, bouncers, and dreamers. She has published four acclaimed short-story collections — Rafael Has Pretty Eyes; Hello, Sweetheart; Valery the Great; and The Watermelon Social — and two novels, Going Fast and The Most Heartless Town in Canada. Rafael Has Pretty Eyes won the 2023 Alistair MacLeod prize for short fiction. Her stories have appeared in over twenty literary journals including Room, The Dalhousie Review, subTerrain, The Antigonish Review, The Fiddlehead, and Other Voices. Plus anthologies. One story was a Journey Prize finalist, another placed second in the Fish international contest in Ireland. McCluskey won the Other Voices short story contest and the Pottersfield Portfolio contest. She lives in Dartmouth, N.S. She has worked as a journalist, a book editor, and a university lecturer. She has a BA from Dalhousie and an MA from Western.

Synopsis

The Gift Child

How important is truth? What is normal? These are the questions raised in The Gift Child, Elaine McCluskey’s fictional oeuvre — a funny, poignant, sure-shot novel, populated with a community of petty criminals, beloved broadcasters, undercover intelligence agents, and more. The novel opens with the disappearance of a man in Pollock Passage, Nova Scotia, a man last seen driving away from a government wharf with a giant tuna head in the basket of his Schwinn delivery bicycle. The man’s name is Graham Swim; he’s good at playing the harmonica and making friends. When Graham’s cousin Harriett decides to investigate his disappearance, she comes up against her own family history. A news photographer now jobless and adrift, Harriett has lived most of her life in the shadow of her larger-than-life father — a once-beloved TV news anchor and borderline narcissist. When Harriett arrives in Pollock Passage, she meets a stranger who tells her he is researching the Shag Harbour UFO mystery. While this stranger helps Harriett reconnect with pieces of herself she thought long-dead, she also learns that what she knows about her father may not be true. Vintage McCluskey, The Gift Child showcases McCluskey’s unique ability to capture the malleability of memory and the complex absurdity and nobility of humanity. It’s a novel that’s hard to put down; it’s even harder to forget.