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by Colette Maitland (Author)
"If Colette Maitland were a musician, you'd say she had perfect pitch."--Isabel Huggan
A soldier's wife struggles to reconnect with her daughter after her husband is killed overseas. A baby abandoned at the rectory door inflames a town with gossip. A dog is shot. A heart attack survivor perplexes his family with a newfound sense of religious euphoria, while a nursing home volunteer struggles with the bad behaviour of one of her veteran patients. Compassionate, clear-eyed, probing grief and insularity, Colette Maitland's short fiction debut shows us the price of keeping the peace in a small town. "Colette Maitland writes like a dream, with a touch that's compellingly subtle--almost deceptively so, since in these stories, danger lurks around every corner, and trouble is resolved in the most surprising and unsentimental ways. By the end I felt I'd experienced a literary sleight-of-hand. I had to double-check that I was reading a debut collection and not the latest in a series of Maitland's wise and lovely books."--Charlotte Gill "Here are the stories you didn't know about the people you do know, and about strangers too, those people you pass on the street without giving them a second thought. Colette Maitland has the inside track on the abiding truth that it is our stories that make us human, for better or worse. Keeping the Peace is a superb debut collection by a writer to watch."--Diane Schoemperlen "These residents of Tim Horton's Nation struggle with illness, death and depression and hang on as best they can with true grit. Raymond Carver meets Norman Levine on these pages, which herald the appearance of a fine new writer of everyday realism."--Antanas Sileika Colette Maitland is the winner of a Kingston Literary Award, the WFNB Literary Competition, and the "Ten Stories High" Short Story Competition.Author Biography
Colette Maitland has been writing short stories since her youngest son entered kindergarten in 1996. She has published widely in literary magazines - The Antigonish Review, Pottersfield Portfolio, Descant, Room of One's Own, The Nashwaak Review, Wascana Review, The Prairie Journal, Freefall, The Puritan, The Fiddlehead, Event and frequently in The New Quarterly. She has also collected a few first place finishes in literary competitions: The Kingston Literary Awards (1998), The WFNB Literary Competition (2006), and The CAA Niagara Branch "Ten Stories High" Short Story Competition (2007). In addition, she was a finalist for the Writers' Union of Canada 10th Annual Postcard Story Contest (2009), and in 2010, she was short-listed for the Metcalf-Rooke Award. Colette is a mother of four grown children, and grandmother to Laura and Rachel. She lives in Gananoque, ON with her husband of thirty-one years, Al Maitland.
