Crocuses Hatch from Snow

Shortlisted for the 2020 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award Shortlisted for the 2020 ReLit Award Ada falls for a body piercer named Pan. Her grandmother, Mattie, says she looks like a caught trout with all those hooks in her mouth. But Mattie is caught too. It isn’t her Alzheimer’s, or the secret vibrator Ada’s mother Joan is convinced she has stashed in her room. Mattie is in love with a ghost. When Joan buys a house in Halifax's north end, the three generations move in next door to Ken, the man at the reins of the machine that tore down their old one. Ken and his family aren’t thrilled about their new neighbours, who are driving up the rent and helping history to repeat itself. While Ada’s obsession with Pan is written on her body, the story of Mattie’s love for Edith, a Mi’kmaw survivor of the Shubenacadie Residential School, unfurls. Next door, Ken grieves his late wife Leona, a powerful Black community organizer, and tries to inspire his disillusioned young son. Meanwhile, his daughter Kiah works to live up to her mother’s magic. A story of luminous love, the frustrations of family, violence mapped onto land and skin, and slender stems that grow thick enough to hatch from snow.