Angelique Lalonde

Home is where we love, suffer, and learn. Some homes we chose, others are inflicted upon us, and still others are bodies we are born into. In this astounding collection of stories, human and more-than-human worlds come together in places we call home.

Four sisters and their mother explore their fears while teeny ghost people dress up in fragments of their children’s clothes. A somewhat-ghost tends the family garden. Deep in the mountains, a shapeshifting mother must sift through her ancestors’ gifts and the complexities of love when one boy is born with a beautiful set of fox ears and another is not. In the wake of her elderly mother’s tragic death, a daughter tries to make sense of the online dating profile she left behind. And a man named Pooka finds new ways to weave new stories into his abode, in spite of his inherited suffering.

A startling and beguiling story collection, Glorious Frazzled Beings is a love song to the homes we make, keep, and break.

Reviews
"Sly, mythical, wise, Glorious Frazzled Beings is an extraordinary work of non-conformist daring: a boy is born with fox ears, an abandoned pregnancy test is encountered by random women in mall bathroom, an overwhelmed mother makes clothing for tiny ghosts. With sharp visionary instinct, Lalonde not only confronts both the magic and cruelty of living, and the border between worlds, mythical and visceral — she lights it on fire. Brilliantly alive, full of devastation and wonder, reading these stories will change you.” — Heidi Sopinka, author of The Dictionary of Animal Languages

“Glorious Frazzled Beings is storytelling magic — a haunting dream of a book, by turns strange and powerfully lucid. I’m captivated by the relations so boldly evoked. I’m moved by the intimacies, the wicked humour, the glorious dare of play. Angélique Lalonde is an original talent who is channeling forces far beyond us in this urgent debut.” — David Chariandy, author of Brother

From the author: "My writing is deeply inspired by walking and being on the land. I see my writing practice as part of my being practice, which is a continuous learning about how to be in relationship with land, place, and the beings who I am responsible to in sharing land. There is a lot to learn and unlearn in this process because we all live on Indigenous lands, whether we are settlers or Indigenous people, or both. I currently live on Gitxsan territory as an uninvited guest so walking on the land is always political as well as spiritual and these complexities emerge in my writing. Lady with the big head chronicle, the first story in my collection, explores some of these complexities from a fictionalized first-person narrator’s point of view. I learned how to walk on the land from my mother, and have always been a displaced person with an unclear relationship to my mother’s ancestors. So I carry her, and my own ancestors with me when I walk and write, sifting through what I’ve inherited and the land and language that holds my walking. I have been blessed to have had several dog friends accompany on my walks throughout my life. They help orient me to a world beyond my human knowing, and these learnings also inspire my writing" - from "Scotiabank Giller Prize Spotlight: Angélique Lalonde" 

Educator Information
Curriculum Connections: Short Stories, Small Town and Rural, Family Life, Magical Realism

Additional Information
304 pages | 5.50" x 7.00" | Paperback