Overtime - by Colette Maitland (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Nine individual stories that come together to create an intimate portrait of a small community, showcasing Maitland's gift for particularizing and elevating the familial banal.

Axel Connor, a fifty-something businessman and beer league goalie, living in a small town, has recently become caregiver to his aging, eternally-dissatisfied mother, Mable, who suffers from early Alzheimer's disease. Mable, asked in the afternoon to sign a birthday card for a resident in her building, discovers she can no longer write her name. In despair, she contacts a suicide hotline and triggers a wellness check visit from local police who then alert Axel. Through the evening, Axel interacts with, observes, or thinks of many people--his mother, members of his hockey team, his sister, his wife and their two sons, the two police officers, a little boy and his mother, a recently deceased ex-friend, hospital staff--but who are these other people outside the roles they play in Axel's story? In Overtime, Colette Maitland tracks an ensemble of characters, their stresses, triumphs, failures, desires, creating an intimate portrait of their small community.

Review Quotes

Praise for Keeping the Peace

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

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

"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 plays with the texture of everydayness. She sensitively and skillfully explores what's left unsaid to keep the façade intact."
--The Telegraph-Journal

"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 and Quire

"Colette Maitland has the inside track on the abiding truth that it is our stories that make us human, for better or worse."
--Diane Schoemperlen

"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

About the Author

Colette Maitland has authored a story collection, Keeping the Peace and a novel, Riel Street. More recently, her short story, "Downsizing," appeared in The New Quarterly (155) and went on to be published in Best Canadian Stories 2021, receiving the Metcalf/Rooke Award for best story in that anthology. Since then, her fiction has appeared twice more in The New Quarterly (167 and 176), and once in Camel 5--an illustrated journal of narrative. Mother to four grown children, and grandmother to three granddaughters, she writes fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction in Gananoque, ON, where she lives with her husband, Al.