Guernica Editions
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Cardinal Divide
Guernica Editions, Fall 2020
446 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN13: 9781771834421
ISBN10: 1771834420
English
$25.00 Canada, $21.95 US, £12.95 UK
Read more from the Essential Prose Series
A father comes out to his daughter as a woman. Or at least, he was once a woman. It's complicated. Funny. Painful. Eventually joyful. Meanwhile the daughter, who was adopted, has her own identity issues. At the Aboriginal addictions treatment centre where she works, everyone assumes she is Indigenous. But is she? How can she find out? Cardinal Divide explores the hunger for certainty and the mutability of identity, whether of gender, race or sexuality. Authenticity isn't simple. Acting as somebody else is simultaneously a way to deceive and to explore the world. Characters who pass as male, as white, as straight, straddle the cardinal divides. And then, sometimes, passing is becoming.
Inside it's hot, dark. The smell of spruce needles in rain washes through my chest, something browner underneath. Pelts line log walls, in one corner a bed made of stout branches. Something hisses and sputters.
By fusing the stories of Dreamcatcher Lodge and Ben’s story of arrival and change, the text breathes new life into narratives of settler/Indigenous encounters and histories. Ben’s story and sense of identity as non-binary is understood as Two-Spirit, which is a reframing of queerness through Indigenous epistemologies. The Cardinal Divide in the foothills of the Rockies serves as an evocative metaphor for the co-mingling of stories and histories.
Julie Cairnie, Canadian Literature
Praise for Nina Newington's first novel, Where Bones Dance: [A]n engaging and moving story of loss and discovery, revealed through dreamlike and delicate vignettes. Newington is an observer who retains the purity, the incomprehension and the sometimes powerful insight of a child, and this is what makes her book so memorable.
Lola Aragon, Times Literary Supplement
An intricate, compelling tale narrated by a woman providing help and support to those who have lost their way, even while she unravels the mysteries of her own path through life. Cardinal Divide illuminates how the relationships we form throughout our lives transcend our cultural and sexual identities. This is a tale that topples our categorical assumptions about others, forcing us to ponder who we are and how we define ourselves.
Charlotte Mendel, author of Turn Us Again and A Hero
Reviews
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Tracking Pasts: The Wild Heavens & Cardinal Divide
Canadian Literature - December 2, 2020
Links
- Nina Newington, David Kingston Yeh, and J Andrew Wainwright discuss writing queer identities and communities
- Nina Newington's Cardinal Divide book launch filmed during a North Mountain Happening
- Nina Newington on Canada, Uncertainty, and Her Newest Book
- Author Interview with Nina Newington on All About Books
- Book signing on a clearcut or two
- Audio Excerpt
- Nina's website
Books by Nina Newington
