Wallflowers

'Assured and ambitious'

A significant new talent [...] for a debut collection this is impressively sure-footed.

The young Canadian writer won the 2013 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and this debut collection shows why. The tales in Wallflowers are at once sad and playful, as weird as life itself, and just as devoid of answers.

Reading Wallflowers, Eliza Robertson’s debut story collection, is like taking a solo swim across a chilly lake. You become mesmerized by details - the silken texture of the water, the cool air on your arms as they rise and fall, the rhythm of your breath, the dark scrub of trees on the distant shore - without ever forgetting the mysteries and potential dangers that lurk beneath.

Her stories display a startlingly original way of looking at the world, finding magic and mystery in ordinary life... Under an almost whimsical playfulness, there is always a dark undercurrent - and the tide can turn at a moment's notice. These shifts are handled expertly, packing a powerful emotional punch. An exciting new voice in short fiction.

In Eliza Robertson’s captivating debut, people drown in grey water, shacks burn on stony beaches, planes crash into rivers, hummingbirds are trapped and tethered to wrists, neighbourhoods flood. Grief and loss cast long shadows over these stories, which sometimes bring us to the threshold of disaster and sometimes explore its aftermath [...] Robertson pays careful attention to the smallest detail [...] But Wallflowers also asks big questions, not only how we survive loss and achieve intimacy, but whether we are strong enough, like the flowers in the flood, to stand straight and sing our sorrows to the world.

Robertson, with her amazing ability for turns of phrase and her insanely creative metaphors, still knows how to rein it all in and deliver a story that is at once quiet and thunderously heartbreaking [...] Eliza Robertson, for me, is a wunderkind, one of our country's most inventive and exciting new writers.