Published in 2025
50 pages
Catherine Bush loves islands and northern landscapes. She is the author of five novels, including Blaze Island, the Canada Reads long-listed Accusation (2013), the Trillium Award short-listed Claire’s Head (2004), and the national bestselling The Rules of Engagement (2000), also a New York Times Notable Book and a Globe & Mail Best Book of the Year. She lives in Toronto and an old schoolhouse in Eastern Ontario and has spoken internationally about addressing the climate crisis in fiction. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Guelph and Coordinator of the Guelph Creative Writing MFA, based in Toronto. Her nonfiction has appeared in publications including the Globe and Mail, The New York Times Magazine, the literary magazine Brick, Canadian Notes and Queries and the anthology, The Heart Does Break (2009).
What is this book about?
Now, for the first time, a blistering book of short fiction from one of Canada’s most loved novelists.
In Skin, Catherine Bush plunges into the vortex of all that shapes us. Summoning relationships between the human and more-than-human, she explores a world where touch and intimacy are both desirable and fraught.
Ranging from the realistic to the speculative, Bush’s stories tackle the condition of our restless, unruly world amidst the tumult of viruses, climate change, and ecological crises. Here, she brings to life unusual and perplexing intimacies: a man falls in love with the wind; a substitute teacher’s behaviour with a student brings unforeseen risks; a woman becomes fixated on offering foot washes to strangers.
Bold, vital, and unmistakably of the moment, Skin gives a charged and animating voice to the question of how we face the world and how, in the process, we discover tenderness and allow ourselves to be transformed.
