I would never have sold him the car in the first place if I’d have known what he was going to do with it.
I’d seen him around town a couple of times, once or twice at the café, just...
Novel
Winner of the ReLit Award for Best Novel
Shortlisted for the Ferro-Grumley Award for Women's Fiction
An American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book
Ivan E. Coyote is acclaimed as one of North America's most beguiling storytellers; Ivan's honest, down-to-earth tales, many of which are based on personal experience, are compelling for their simple human truths. Her 2005 story collection, Loose End, was also shortlisted for the prestigious Ferro-Grumley Award for Women's Fiction.
Bow Grip, Ivan's long-awaited first novel, is a breathtaking story about love and loneliness, and the long road one must travel between them. Joey is a good-hearted, fortysomething mechanic from small-town Alberta whose wife has recently left him for another woman. When a stranger named James approaches his shop and agrees to purchase a beat-up blue Volvo in exchange for a beautiful, hand-crafted cello, Joey sees it as an opportunity to finally make some overdue changes in his life.
But some troubling suspicions about James, and a desire to close the door on his failed marriage, compels Joey to hit the road and travel to Calgary, the big city by the Bow River. He stations himself at a rundown motel, where he struggles to learn how to play the cello, and strangers with their own complicated pasts―an older gay man, a single mother―become confidants. With quiet authority, Bow Grip is about one man's real rite of passage―trying to keep the ghosts of personal history at bay with a heart that's as big as the endless prairie sky.
German-language rights sold to Verlag Krug & Schadenberg
Now in its third printing
I would never have sold him the car in the first place if I’d have known what he was going to do with it.
I’d seen him around town a couple of times, once or twice at the café, just...
First-time novelist Ivan E. Coyote proves that she’s not only a sprinter, but a middle-distance runner. Author of the short fiction collections Close to Spider-Man and One Man’s Trash, Coyote stretches her legs in ‘. Joey, a forty-something mechanic with a quirky, likeable voice, is trying to recover from his wife leaving him.
There are many reasons why stories told from the perspective of teens and early twentysomethings can falter in the eyes of older readers. When you’re young, life is full of superlatives, everything seems exciting and new, and this can lead to writing that suffers from a lack of subtlety and the illusion of a unique experience.
Love: what's it all about? That's the common question that lies at the root of two wildly different novels-Ivan E. Coyote's Bow Grip and Alan Cumyn's The Famished Lover. Though set in different Canadian cities, at different times, and focusing on vastly different characters, the books are united by their shared interest in the journey of the fallible and failed lover who learns, through heartbreak, that there is some comfort to be had when one stops yearning for the impossible and learns to focus on the possibilities of life left unexplored.
Short Stories

Short Stories

Short Stories

Novel

Short Stories

Short Stories

Short Stories
Short Stories