All the Voices Cry

"Alice Petersen writes as eloquently about the natural world as she does about the world of human emotion and desire. This is a wise and impressive collection of stories."--David Bezmozgis, author of "The Free World"

Alice Petersen's "All the Voices Cry" is masterful and potent--incredibly satisfying for a reader.

-- Kathleen Winter, author of "Annabel"

An academic's wife, struggling to keep up with her husband's quest to find a long-dead author's Tahitian love-garden, realizes that her own idea of paradise no longer includes her husband. An architect dreams of slender redheads, Champlain's astrolabe, and a brush with mortality--and finds at least the latter at "Danseuses 7 Jours." An elderly man boards a trans-Pacific flight in an attempt to elude the prediction of a psychic, only to understand too late how the prophecy has shaped his actions.

In "All the Voices Cry," modern life collides with all the old pushes and pulls: city and country, the global and the local, the ideal and the real. Petersen's characters chase the mirage of escape, and are brought up hard by reality. This is a book rooted in landscape, tangled in the brambles of personal history, and it introduces in Alice Petersen a wondrous new voice that is yours to discover. Alice Petersen is a writer and critic whose work has been shortlisted for numerous Canadian prizes and awards. She was born in New Zealand and now lives and works in Montreal, Quebec.