Books
“[Bush’s] books are structurally daring and psychologically penetrating.”
— Padma Viswanathan, The Rumpus
Blaze Island
A Globe and Mail Top 100 Selection
A Writers’ Trust Best Books of the Year Selection
A 49th Shelf Books of the Year Selection
“Swept away. This novel is sublime.” — Lisa Moore, author of Caught and February
“Timely . . . a gripping page-turner.” — Elle Canada
“Bush’s deeply resonant ecological retelling of The Tempest showcases a “brave new world” as ironic as Shakespeare’s: brave because it is startling, dangerous and inescapable for those left alive; new because it really isn’t, merely the whirlwind humanity has sowed for its children to reap.” — Maclean’s
“A page-turner that confers a moral imperative of our time.” — Kerri Sakamoto for the Writers’ Trust of Canada
“Reminiscent of E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News with a slight magic realism take on Newfoundland, and a tinge of John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, set in a post-Tribulation Labrador.” — The Telegram
“Atmospheric and dramatic, Blaze Island . . . introduces food for thought about apt responses to our predicament and what sacrifices might need to be made to stabilize the natural world.” — Toronto Star
“The novel acts as an alarm bell for the ways the rapidly changing climate will set back the world as we know it. Tensions … fuel the narrative, much like a storm that keeps building before it becomes a tempest.” — Quill & Quire
“An elegantly crafted story that also proves to be a sizzling ecological thriller.” — Postmedia
“Alan (Milan) Wells, a Prospero for the Anthropocene, is a climate change fugitive, a prisoner of conscience on a self-imposed exile to Blaze Island with his daughter Miranda. There’s a gorgeous tension between them. His decisions impact her like weather, imposed and out of her control.” — Hamilton Review of Books
“As you’d expect, the novel poses morally complex questions. It does so with the tautness of a thriller and the luxuriant precision of poetry.” — Atlantic Books Today
“Compelling and beautiful … In the famous end of The Tempest, Prospero asks that the audience free him and the other characters from the dream of the play. Blaze Island amounts to a similar request. To deny or ignore our changing world is to stay willfully dreaming.” — Bookshelf.ca
“Characters are vibrantly 3D and come together in a hot mess of passion and conflict. There are deep and daunting questions raised and readers will never look at a cloudy sky the same.” — Alphabet Soup
Excerpt
She was in the blast. Wind and rain tore at her. Wind ripped through her jacket, her hair, her skin, her mouth. A monstrous fury. Was this the worst, the edge of the hugest hurricane ever to pound up the coast? She was nothing to it. Wind would carry her away, but there was someone else, a boy, a young man, trying to pull himself up the steps to her house. She had to help.
More on the Blaze Island page and the Media page.
Watch the Blaze Island Book Trailer on the Blaze Island page.
Accusation
“Catherine Bush’s Accusation is a novel of great global and emotional scope.”
— David Bezmozgis, author of The Free World and Natasha and Other Stories
Accusation chosen as a Best Book of the Year by NOW Magazine and Amazon.ca. A Canada Reads Top 40 Pick.
“A persistent tapping at the complexities of prejudice – the accusations we harbour in our hearts – brings an unnerving friction to Accusation… Bush’s prose is deeply considered, calm on the surface yet, on closer reading, full of ambiguities…Accusation is both a psychological thriller and a novel of anxiety: How can we interpret the actions of another if we are unable to perceive the most crucial elements? In the end, the inner life of another person might be the greatest mystery of all, especially if it was their exoticism that first attracted us. Our projections might blind us to the things every person holds in common: the desire to give love without reserve, the desire, perhaps impossible, to be seen fully, in our complexity, before the blade of judgment falls.”
— Madeleine Thien, The Globe and Mail
“…Be assured that Accusation is that rare beast: a literary novel with the page-turning properties of the best genre fiction. View it from a slightly oblique angle, in fact, and it could almost be a crime novel of the Scandinavian variety, Henning Mankell or Karen Fossum striding headlong into the murkier reaches of human motivation.”
— Montreal Gazette
“Concentric circles spread steadily from the ethical dilemma at the novel’s core, growing in depth and implication right up until a perfectly pitched and exquisitely surprising ending. Critical acclaim has never been in short supply for Bush, but there’s a sense that Accusation, with a bit of good fortune, could also be her commercial breakthrough.”
— Calgary Herald
“A compelling novel that is an exploration of the complex ethical arena of accusations…. Accusation — rich with questions and complexity — is also an homage to the transformative powers of the circus, the beauty and possibility of beginning again.”
— Vancouver Sun
For More Articles, Interviews and Reviews go to Media. For Events go to News and Events.
Watch the Accusation Book Trailer by Mike Hoolboom on the Accusation page.
Excerpt
He was out there somewhere, and something led from her to him. She rose to her feet and swallowed a mouthful of whisky. What she owed him was the space in which to be innocent without dismissing the story of his accusers. The internal juggling act was trying to hold both these things in her head at once. He was not charged with anything. Her body coiled in horror and disbelief and fear and compassion and with the desire not to judge, because legally it was wrong as yet to judge him, either him or his accusers, but him in particular because he was the accused and as yet only accused and in some small way she knew what this felt like.
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Claire’s Head
Shortlisted for the Trillium Award, a Best Book of the Year as chosen by the Globe and Mail.
“Brilliantly conceived and executed . . . a strange, complex, breathtaking double journey. ”
– The Globe and Mail
“Catherine Bush’s fiction is clear, humane, gripping, and unfailingly intelligent. She is one of our finest writers.”
– Barbara Gowdy
Excerpt
Sometimes the healer laid his hands on her and sometimes he didn’t. His touch could be a fleck, an adjustment, a vibrating manipulation… He spoke to her as he worked although she couldn’t altogether remember or make sense of what he was saying. Partly it was his accent. At one point he asked her how she was feeling and she said fine now, and if he meant generally then good except that, like Rachel, she got a lot of migraines. He asked her to turn over, onto her back. He laid one hand on her chest, on top of her collarbone, between her breasts, and peered down at her. “You must ask, ‘What is the place of pain?’”
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The Rules of Engagement
A New York Times Notable Book, National Bestseller in Canada, a Best Book of the Year as chosen by the Globe and Mail, and the Los Angeles Times
“Marvelous and strange … When Bush writes of people living in houseboats on the canals of London, floating between settled places, it’s hard not to think she’s writing metaphorically, of a different way of defining home.” – Pico Iyer
Excerpt
“People aren’t just fleeing from something, they’re fleeing to. They want borders, safety, government. States. Which is not an argument in favor of nationalism—”
He leaped to his feet. “Is that what all this is about? Really?”
“No,” I said as my voice rose. “It’s the risk. It seems so crazy when you’ve—”
“How can you, the theorist, possibly judge me?”
“I’m not judging you!”
“Shhh.” Finger to his lips. “I’ve chosen this risk. Chosen it.” I’d have backed away from him if there were anywhere to back. “Perhaps if you took a few more risks yourself. Isn’t that the question, really, Arcadia? It is, isn’t it? What are the risks that you’d be willing to take?”
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Minus Time
Shortlisted for the SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the 1994 City of Toronto Book Award
“An elegant spiritual examination of a woman struggling to find her bearings: Catcher in the Rye done female, done Canadian.” – Tibor Fischer, The Times
Excerpt
And maybe, in a way, it was easier to hear the news by phone, without being face to face with your animation, the pull and tug in your features as you tried to hide—although I could hear your radiance translating itself unmistakably over the phone. If I took away your restlessness and love of distance, then I had nothing: no mother at all. Our father had vanished in an instant; you unpeeled yourself from us like skin, piece by piece. No. You hurled us with you into the future. We soared over other people’s barbecues and skating expeditions and shopping trips, an atomic family, fissioning in all directions, spiraling through the air.
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