The city of Fontainebleau, situated on the banks of the Detroit River, is undergoing growing pains and strange things are happening. There's something poisonous in the water, something menacing in the sky, and the soil, laced with an ancient curse, is yielding up unidentified bones along with corn. In this collection of linked stories-part surreal picaresque, part dark comedy, and part murder mystery-magic meets the mundane as misfits and miscreants struggle to free themselves from untenable situations. A girl with mermaid syndrome disappears into a field, a fugitive boy dreams of finding anonymity in Toronto while his abandoned pregnant girlfriend hallucinates his second coming, and a nostalgic chambermaid finds her memories vanish when she puts on a stranger's wig. There's a rash of killings in the city that attract a lovesick police officer. No one knows who's responsible for the crimes, but the city has plenty of candidates, like the crazy son of a judge who murdered a man in Disney World and the grieving vandal who's obsessed with the idea of cutting a woman in half. Then there are the abusive husbands, snuff film producers, inconspicuous con women, and pederasts who live secret double lives. Are the characters in this oddly probable world masters or victims of their own fate? How do their lives intersect? Is it likely that destruction will ultimately prevail over this desolate land, or will consciousness, like a flaming firebird, lead at least some of the city's inhabitants to self-acceptance, redemption, or escape? (Includes book group and study guide.)

Winner, City of Victoria Butler Book Prize Finalist, Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction Nominated for the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction Afflictions & Departures is a collection of first-person experiential essays. However, this is not the realm of traditional memoir-in addition to incidents and feelings recaptured from memory, Sonik seeks out connections between the microcosm of the daily events of her childhood and adolescence, and the social, historical, and scientific trends of the time. Afflictions & Departures begins by considering the turbulent and changing nature of the world in the late 1950s and early 1960s-the world in which the author was conceived and born. Like many couples of that era, Madeline Sonik's parents focused on shared social and economic ambitions at the expense of authentic personal feeling. These ambitions would erode and, by the 1970s, completely collapse. These essays are as incisive as they are moving, and leave the reader with a sense of history as it was lived, not as it is codified in countless textbooks. Praise for Afflictions & Departures: "Startlingly original, Madeline Sonik's moving story of her childhood defies all our expectations of memoir. She captures crystalline moments of childhood memory and links them in a daisy-chain with corresponding events of the tumultuous societal change taking place outside her home. It is North America in the 1960s and 70s and her letter-perfect, child's-eye view of the world brings back that time with such intensity that the reader can almost smell and taste it. Droll, tragic, and absolutely compelling, Afflictions and Departures is a visceral portrayal of a family imploding." (Jury, Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction) "Her memory is dustless, capacious, uncanny. With a storyteller's skill and a poet's depth of vision, she recreates her childhood with one eye on her family and the other on the larger world. Significant cultural markers sit side-by-side with the small, painful intensities of her childhood. This memoir is crammed with pathos, yet is written with a light touch. I adore the narrator who never falls into self-pity or narcissism. The clarity of her vision makes the prose gleam and transforms autobiography into art." (Lorna Crozier, author of Small Beneath the Sky) "From the patchwork craziness of a sixties and seventies suburban childhood, Madeline Sonik has fashioned a singular coming-of-age story in which the age itself assumes a starring role. Sharply observed, hilarious, and heartbreaking, Afflictions & Departures is a wise, tender, and beautifully written book." (Susan Olding, author of Pathologies: a life in essays)