The Fishers of Paradise

✍ Scribed by Rachael Preston

• Year: 2012
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 215 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

"unputdownable!" Susie Moloney, author of The Thirteen

As Egypt Fisher learns, there's a power to be mined in keeping secrets, and lies quickly take on a life of their own.

1. The boathouse community of Cootes Paradise is under siege. The squatters' shacks that line the shores of Dundas Marsh stand in the way of an ambitious politician's "City Beautiful" plans.When a handsome drifter settles there, Egypt Fisher and her mother both fall under his spell. No one expects Egypt's gambling con-man father to return after a mysterious six-year absence. But he does and he's furious. Unhinged by jealousy and a harrowing brush with the local mafia at a cockfight, he reveals a family secret that sets Egypt's world off-kilter and poisons her relationship with her mother. When Egypt tries to turn the situation to her own advantage, her lies set in motion a series of events with devastating consequences.

The Fishers of Paradise is a story about choices and consequences, and a family pushed to the edge. In striving to cope with the emotional fallout from decisions made in the past, as well as all that fate and circumstance level at them, the Fishers discover that hope and love can thrive and families can reinvent themselves.

Praise for The Wind Seller:
"The novel is a literary page-turner, churning with thrilling scenes...seamlessly constructed."
-- The Globe & Mail

"The Wind Seller is carefully crafted and contains splendid descriptions of the Fundy coast and its communities...Ms. Preston is deft at creating a number of simultaneous plots and intricately detailed characters, smoothly moving her story to its completion without abandoning any of them along the way."
-- The Chronicle Herald

"a rollicking saga that's lusty and satisfying. . . .Preston has an adroit way with a plot; when she segues from one character's storyline to another, in the narrative's present day or in flashback, it is seamless. Her characters are believable, resilient and quirky, and her prose is thrilling."
-- The Hamilton Spectator

Praise for Tent of Blue:
"Tent of Blue is an ambitious debut novel...Preston's rich and vivid evocation of the two main characters and their vastly differing milieus is crucial to the novel's themes: Yvonne and Anton's relationships with their mothers (not to mention their absent fathers) mirror one another, while the backstage sequences of Yvonne's music-hall past provide a fascinating counterpoint to Anton's furtive adolescent longings. Preston shifts easily between the two narrative strands, never allowing one to overshadow the other."
-- Quill & Quire

The story of a boy and his mother striving to create themselves as they learn to live heroically, despite the scathing violence of love. A novel that lingers long after the final page.
--Shauna Singh Baldwin, author of What the Body Remembers

Review

The landscape alone would have won me over, but it's the story that makes Rachael Preston's new novel truly irresistible. Set in the last, drawn-out days of the boathouse community of Cootes Paradise in Hamilton in the 1930s, the book dives to the muddy bottom of uncertainty and insecurity; to the violations to body and soul. Its real setting, though, is in the lives it selects from out of that small, intertwined population, in their rising and falling, sinking or swimming. These are lives generally more than a few degrees short of, or beyond perfection--which makes them all the more riveting. With her limber and direct prose Preston follows these evasive spirits along the trails they make through the demolitions, as they search for something that looks like home.

--John Terpstra, author of *The Boys, Or, Waiting for the Electrician's Daughter*

About the Author

The Fishers of Paradise is Rachael Preston's third novel. She is the author of critically acclaimed Tent of Blue and The Wind Seller. Originally from Yorkshire, she now lives in British Columbia, Canada.