Pre-order/order from the Canadian publisher here. Feel free to order from your favourite independent bookstore.
Ranging from the realistic to the speculative, the stories of Skin tackle the condition of our restless, unruly world amidst the tumult of viruses, climate change, and ecological crises, bringing to life unusual and perplexing intimacies: a man falls in love with the wind; a substitute teacher’s behaviour with a student brings unforeseen risks; a woman becomes fixated on offering foot washes to strangers. Bold, vital, and unmistakably of the moment, Skin gives a charged and animating voice to the question of how we face the world and how, in the process, we discover tenderness and allow ourselves to be transformed.
Advance Praise for Skin
Catherine Bush asks the most daring question, how do we connect? Not only with those close to us, but with strangers, the natural world, and a climate crisis. The characters in these stories make a bold reach across a void — I loved what I found on the other side, a collection that is incredibly tender, tumultuous, and touching. – Claire Cameron, author of How to Survive a Bear Attack and The Last Neanderthal
Skin is an intimate collection of stories that reveal people at their most vulnerable and their most dangerous. Subtle, stinging and beautifully observed, the title story still has its grip on my heart. – Tessa McWatt, author of The Snag and The Snow Line
Deftly woven through a thematic tapestry of surfaces and skin, these stories are memorable, riveting, and seismic. Catherine Bush pens tender anthems of verboten intimacy and familial survival, earth and flesh and glacial being. – David Huebert, author of Oil People and Chemical Valley
Skin dives under the surface of relationships, revealing hidden streams of desire, longing, pain, and deliverance. In successive stories that are penetrating and absorbing, Catherine Bush also explores how we are deepening our love affair, in this time of climate storms and glacier melt, with the more-than-human world. — Shaena Lambert, author of Petra and Oh, My Darling