 Listen to Gail read from Turtle Valley 
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Gail Anderson-Dargatz's thrilling new novel marks her return to the landscape she charted so brilliantly in her beloved international bestseller, The Cure for Death by Lightning. The story -- of love and land and memory - is propelled by the progress of a forest fire that sends flames raining down from the hills surrounding the peaceful and secluded Turtle Valley. Disillusioned with a marriage that has been severely tested by illness and exhausted by the demands of care-giving, Kat returns to her childhood home with her husband and young son in order to help her aging parents prepare to leave. As she sorts through her parents' belongings and wrestles with the question of what to save and what to leave behind, Kat finds in her grandmother's tattered carpet bag a clue to a decades-old family mystery involving the disappearance of her grandfather, John. As she tries to unravel the tangled threads of her family's past -- urgently, because the fire is starting to move into the valley and authorities have placed area residents on a ten-minute evacuation alert – Kat uncovers the terrifying story of what really happened and discovers startling parallels between her grandmother’s life and her own. As she does so, she also renews an old friendship -- with a man who makes her wonder about possibilities she thought were long gone. Sure to be remembered as one of her most haunting and magical novels yet, Turtle Valley is a page-turner filled with the lush descriptions, ghostly manifestations, and dark poetry that has made Gail Anderson-Dargatz an international literary sensation. Gail Anderson-Dargatz, whose fictional style has been coined as “Pacific Northwest Gothic” by the Boston Globe, has been compared by critics to John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Salman Rushdie and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The Cure for Death by Lightning won the UK’s Betty Trask Prize among other awards, and both it and A Recipe for Bees were shortlisted for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize and were international bestsellers. She currently teaches fiction in the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of British Columbia, and lives in the Shuswap, the landscape found in so much of her writing. Praise for Turtle Valley National Bestseller “A beautifully written and satisfying tale.”—Winnipeg Free Press “There are no one-note emotions or motivations here—every feeling, impulse, is in flux, tangled and bleeding in each other, love the most complicated emotion of all.”—Ottawa Citizen “Turtle Valley has all the hallmarks of the author’s previous bestsellers. . . . It zooms into the heart of rural life, with its family ties and rivalries, while ripping open the doors of family closets and letting the insecurities, eccentricities and dark secrets pour out. . . . Another suspenseful page-turner.”—The Vancouver Sun “As with most celebrated fiction in this country, a sense of place is as important as the characters. . . . There is a homespun, 19th-century quality to Anderson-Dargatz’s work . . . [Anderson-Dargatz] is an authentic talent.”—Calgary Herald “Turtle Valley lives up to [Anderson-Dargatz’s] gothic reputation. . . . It’s a tense, passionate story of family and memory, haunting and history.”—Vancouver Courier “[Anderson-Dargatz] is skilled at peeling back the layers of love, commitment and confusion that most families experience.”—The Globe and Mail “Ghosts weave in and out of the smoke, decades-old passions are re-examined, life-changing options present themselves, life and loss continue, unabated. [Turtle Valley] is both haunting and haunted (as it’s both a romance-mystery and a ghost story) and it carries powerful magic all its own.”—The Hamilton Spectator “Part mystery, part memory story, part eco-conscious tale, but a rare take on illness in the context of a marriage is what makes Turtle Valley a winner. . . . Gripping.”—NOW (Toronto) |