Keeping the Peace

"If Colette Maitland were a musician, you'd say she had perfect pitch."--Isabel Huggan A soldier's wife struggles to reconnect with her daughter after her husband is killed overseas. A baby abandoned at the rectory door inflames a town with gossip. A dog is shot. A heart attack survivor perplexes his family with a newfound sense of religious euphoria, while a nursing home volunteer struggles with the bad behaviour of one of her veteran patients. Compassionate, clear-eyed, probing grief and insularity, Colette Maitland's short fiction debut shows us the price of keeping the peace in a small town. "Colette Maitland writes like a dream, with a touch that's compellingly subtle--almost deceptively so, since in these stories, danger lurks around every corner, and trouble is resolved in the most surprising and unsentimental ways. By the end I felt I'd experienced a literary sleight-of-hand. I had to double-check that I was reading a debut collection and not the latest in a series of Maitland's wise and lovely books."--Charlotte Gill "Here are the stories you didn't know about the people you do know, and about strangers too, those people you pass on the street without giving them a second thought. Colette Maitland has the inside track on the abiding truth that it is our stories that make us human, for better or worse. Keeping the Peace is a superb debut collection by a writer to watch."--Diane Schoemperlen "These residents of Tim Horton's Nation struggle with illness, death and depression and hang on as best they can with true grit. Raymond Carver meets Norman Levine on these pages, which herald the appearance of a fine new writer of everyday realism."--Antanas Sileika Colette Maitland is the winner of a Kingston Literary Award, the WFNB Literary Competition, and the "Ten Stories High" Short Story Competition.