September 28, 2023:

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Wait Softly Brother

Wait Softly Brother

From lost siblings to the horrors of war to tales of selkie wives, Wait Softly Brother is filled with questions about memory, reality and the truths hidden in family lore.

After twenty years of looping frustrations Kathryn walks out of her marriage and washes up in her childhood home determined to write her way to a new life. There she is put to work by her aging parents sorting generations of memories and mementos as biblical rains fall steadily and the house is slowly cut off from the rest of the world. Lured away from the story she is determined to write – that of her stillborn brother, Wulf – by her mother’s gift of crumbling letters, Kathryn instead begins to piece together the strange tale of an earlier ancestor, Russell Boyt, who fought as a substitute solider in the American Civil War.

As the water rises, and more truths come to the surface, the two stories begin to mingle in unexpected and beautiful ways.

In this elegantly written novel Kuitenbrouwer deftly unravels the stories we are told to believe by society and shows the reader how to weave new tales of hope and possibility.

About the author

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer is the bestselling author of the novels Wait Softly Brother, All the Broken Things, Perfecting, and The Nettle Spinner, as well as, the story collection, Way Up.

Her work has been published in Granta Magazine, Maclean’s Magazine, The Walrus, Significant Objects, Storyville, Joyland, This Magazine, The Lifted Brow and 7X7LA. Her fiction has won a Danuta Gleed Award, and been nominated for The Amazon.ca First Novel Award, Toronto Book Award, CBC Canada
Reads, and the Relit Award.

She is the recipient of The Sidney Prize. An award-winning professor, Kathryn teaches at The University of Toronto.

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