Split Tooth
By Tanya Tagaq
Longlisted for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize
Shortlisted for the 2019 Amazon First Novel Award
Shortlisted for the 2019 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize
Winner of the 2019 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Prose in English
Winner of the 2018 Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design - Prose Fiction
Longlisted for the 2019 Sunburst Award
From the internationally acclaimed Inuit throat singer who has dazzled and enthralled the world with music it had never heard before, a fierce, tender, heartbreaking story unlike anything you've ever read.
Fact can be as strange as fiction. It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous. In the end, there may be no difference between them.
A girl grows up in Nunavut in the 1970s. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents' love. She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw, amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol, and violence at the hands of those she should be able to trust. She sees the spirits that surround her, and the immense power that dwarfs all of us.
When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this.
Veering back and forth between the grittiest features of a small arctic town, the electrifying proximity of the world of animals, and ravishing world of myth, Tanya Tagaq explores a world where the distinctions between good and evil, animal and human, victim and transgressor, real and imagined lose their meaning, but the guiding power of love remains.
Haunting, brooding, exhilarating, and tender all at once, Tagaq moves effortlessly between fiction and memoir, myth and reality, poetry and prose, and conjures a world and a heroine readers will never forget.
Loved by our collective!
"Time has a way of eternally looping us in the same configurations. Like fruit flies, we are unable to register the patterns. Just because we are the crest of the wave does not mean the ocean does not exist. What has been before will be again."
Set in a northern region where the seasons oscillate between the permanent darkness of winter and the delirious never-ending daylight of summer, Tanya Tagaq's #ownvoices mythobiography dances between extremes. Presented through gorgeous poetry, prose, and retellings of myths, Split Tooth explores the tenderness and beauty that coexists with the harshness of daily life in a tight-knit indigenous community devastated by colonialism, addiction, and sexual abuse. In equal measure fantastical and brutally real, Split Tooth will appeal to fans of other dark magical realism titles such as Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House and Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater
Content warnings: Addiction, domestic violence, sexual abuse, pregnancy & birth, infanticide
Product Details
- Paperback
- 208 pages
- ISBN
- 9780143198055
- Publisher
- Penguin Books Canada (9/24/19)
- Dimensions
- 5.2 x 0.5 x 8 inches
- Tags
Tags
bipoc representation, canada, inuktitut / inuit, magical realism, native protagonist