• Ezra's Ghosts

Ezra's Ghosts

by Darcy Tamayose

Added to your cart!

View cart or continue shopping.

Find at your local bookstore

978-1-77439-047-4 | 2022 May | 280 Pages

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Award-winning author Darcy Tamayose returns with Ezra’s Ghosts, a collection of fantastical stories linked by a complex mingling of language and culture, as well as a deep understanding of grief and what it makes of us. Within these pages a scholar writes home from the Ryukyu islands, not knowing that his hometown will soon face a deadly calamity of its own. Another seeker of truth is trapped in Ezra after her violent death, and must watch how her family—and her killer—alter in her absence. The oldest man in town, an immigrant who came to Canada to escape imperial hardships, sprouts wings, and a wounded journalist bears witness to his transformation. Finally, past and present collide as a researcher reflects on the recent skinwars that have completely altered the world’s topography. Binding the stories together is an intersect of arrival and departure—in a quiet prairie town called Ezra.

“Darcy Tamayose—a wondrous talent arising through Canadian prairie soil to let us see ourselves more clearly, more fully and deeply through our unique histories—in her case, through the singular warmth and healing light of Okinawa. If any place on earth is magical, it is there.”
— Joy Kogawa, author of Obasan

“[A]n immersive and intelligent page turner.... this is a treasure.” (full review)
— Publishers Weekly

“Magic realism, murder mystery, science fiction, academic satire, folkloric allusion, and, of course, ghost story—there is no shortage of narrative in these linked novelettes. But Ezra’s Ghosts is something more remarkable: a fabric of stories that frays to reveal the poetry beneath and between, and finally the ephemeral shimmer that is deeper than words.”
— Randy Nikkel Schroeder, author of Arctic Smoke

“Darcy Tamayose has somehow given us a luminously magical exploration of raw human anguish. This collection will stick with you; we should all be haunting Ezra.”
— C.J. Lavigne, author of In Veritas

“Darcy Tamayose’s latest book may not be arriving with the same fanfare as the 9/11-influenced works by DeLillo, Messud or Auster, but like those authors she successfully captures the intimate, felt experience of a world-changing event."
— Yutaka Dirks, Alberta Views (full review)

"The writing is poetic and multilayered, as befits the best of CanLit, but remains accessible and unpretentious."
— Robert Runté, The Ottawa Review of Books (full review)

"[t]ouching and hard to categorize ... [a] wonderfully conceived figure on par with the novelist Alessandro Baricco's best characters is the willing reader's prize."
— Literary Review of Canada

“Ezra's Ghosts was interesting, and richly intelligent, and strange and surprising, but it was also gripping, and full of suspense.” 
— Kerry Clare, Editor of 49th Shelf and founder of the Pickle Me This Blog (full review)

“[Ezra's Ghosts is] an intrepid, contemporary collection of short stories ... a unique literary experience.” 
— E.R. Zarevich, Herizons Magazine