Keeping the Peace - by Colette Maitland (Paperback)

About the Book

"Martin's death was singular and pre-9/11, before death became everybody's business."

Book Synopsis

"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.

Review Quotes

"Well rendered, with a wise array of lifelike characters facing moments of personal compromise."--The Globe & Mail

"Straightforward realism with a touch of knowing humor."--The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Taken together, [Maitland's] sketches of fractured blue-collar homes form something unexpected: a portrait of a community...subtly rendered, with characters weaving in and out of each other's stories almost imperceptibly."--Quill & Quire

"This fine debut collection of 19 stories are mostly set in small-town Southern Ontario and involve the extraordinary events that mark ordinary lives."--The Toronto Star

"Yeats said that a poem 'comes right with a click like a closing box' [and] the metaphor extrapolates well to short fiction endings ... More often than not, Maitland nails this elusive 'click' ... a fine execution."--The Malahat Review

"Maitland's stories push harder against the edges of reality, focusing on the fraying edges of relationships. The title may be Keeping the Peace, but these stories more often articulate the point at which relationships fragment. There is much anxiety that the peace be kept, that the code be followed, but damnation is inevitable within this mythology. The centre cannot hold."--Michael Bryson, The Winnipeg Review

"Small-town Ontario is a ripe setting for short fiction because, like a good short story, there is a lot going on in a tiny space. The landscape is layered and complicated. In Keeping the Peace, Maitland plays with the texture of everydayness. She sensitively and skillfully explores what's left unsaid to keep the façade intact."--The Telegraph-Journal

"If Colette Maitland were a musician, you'd say she had perfect pitch ... she writes with enormous empathy about characters whose lives have gone wrong. These stories push us to acknowledge the many flaws and faults that hamper human beings in the search for happiness...and then they push us further, into the realm of understanding, compassion, and forgiveness." --Isabel Huggan

"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 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, author of Eating Dirt and Winner of the B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction

"A very accomplished writer."--Literary Thunder Bay

About the Author

Colette Maitland has been writing short stories since her youngest son entered kindergarten in 1996. She has published widely in literary magazines - The Antigonish Review, Pottersfield Portfolio, Descant, Room of One's Own, The Nashwaak Review, Wascana Review, The Prairie Journal, Freefall, The Puritan, The Fiddlehead, Event and frequently in The New Quarterly. She has also collected a few first place finishes in literary competitions: The Kingston Literary Awards (1998), The WFNB Literary Competition (2006), and The CAA Niagara Branch "Ten Stories High" Short Story Competition (2007). In addition, she was a finalist for the Writers' Union of Canada 10th Annual Postcard Story Contest (2009), and in 2010, she was short-listed for the Metcalf-Rooke Award. Colette is a mother of four grown children, and grandmother to Laura and Rachel. She lives in Gananoque, ON with her husband of thirty-one years, Al Maitland.