About the Book:
Stunt, a debut novel from Toronto playwright and Globe and Mail columnist Claudia Dey.
"On your bicycle, we are flying. In my sock feet and nightgown, I stand up on your handlebars, the prow of a ship heading into the great unknown, and I climb onto your mile-wide shoulders, can see the next continent … You catch the moon, always heavy in your mouth. You tell me it tastes like ice and regret. You tell me it tastes like liftoff."
Eugenia Ledoux, nine years old, wakes to a note from her father: "gone to save the world. sorry. yours, sheb wooly ledoux. asshole." Eugenia is left behind with her mother, the sharp-edged B-movie actress Mink, and her sister, the death-obsessed and hauntingly beautiful Immaculata. When Mink climbs into the family car and vanishes, Eugenia doubles in age overnight, but remains the dark and diminutive creature who earned the nickname Stunt.
Eugenia devotes herself to finding Sheb. She writes to the man she believes to be Sheb's father: I.I. Finbar Me The Three, a retired tightrope walker. Waiting for Finbar's response, she retreats to Toronto Island, where she meets Samuel Station, a barefoot voluptuary, world traveller and ring-maker.
When Finbar does write back, Eugenia wonders if she will find what she is looking for — or something else entirely. Studded with postcards from outer space, twins, levitation, the explosion of a shoulder-pad factory, and some accomplished taxidermy, Stunt is part dirge, part cowboy poetry and part love letter to the wilder corners of Toronto and of ourselves.
Stunt chosen by Quill & Quire as one of 15 books to remember from 2008 and the The Globe and Mail as one of the top 100 books of that year.
What people say:
"At once hypnotic and dazzling, Stunt is, quite simply, a feat." — The Globe and Mail
"This surrealist coming-of-age novel — a shot of Catcher in the Rye with a One Hundred Years of Solitude chaser — is the perfect vehicle for Dey's caustic wit and trenchant observations… It's as if poet Anne Carson and satirist Mordecai Richler accidentally collided at a drunken PEN fundraiser to produce a mischievous, magical and observant girl-child." — Toronto Star
"Stunt is mesmerizing, rewarding, and breathtaking. Dey never lets up, never writes simply, plainly, or boringly. Like Eugenia's nightfall, Dey's book is 'all dark majesty and menace,' and wonderful to read." — Quill & Quire, starred review
"With Stunt, she has penned one of the most ambitious and original debut novels to come out of this town, or even out of this country, in some time. Read it." — Post City Magazine
"It's a bit of a fever dream set in, of all places, Toronto. Somehow, Toronto filtered through the vivid imagination of Claudia Dey, has been transformed, a la Ondaatje, or even Gabriel Garcia Marquez, into a wild, raw, mysterious place filled with idiosyncratic characters." — Calgary Herald
About the Author:
Claudia Dey is a Canadian writer whose plays have been translated into French and German, and produced internationally. They include Beaver, Trout Stanley and the Governor General's Award- and Trillium Award-nominated The Gwendolyn Poems. Claudia is a graduate of McGill University and the National Theatre School. She writes the Group Therapy column for The Globe and Mail. Stunt is her first novel.