What Endures - by Pauline Holdstock (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"Funny and serious, with a subtle power that accumulates like a shoplifter adding coat upon coat."--Mark Anthony Jarman

A couple adopt a difficult dog and argue over morality. A man abandons his family in the middle of the night and spontaneously takes a flight across the country. A woman is rushed into emergency brain surgery at Christmas time.

What Endures represents Pauline Holdstock's responses to a world evolving at terrifying speed, exposing the absurd, the ridiculous, and the downright disturbing. Ranging from the eerily speculative to the flat-out comic, Holdstock's stories attempt to discover what it is that saves us, time and again, from despair at ourselves and our world.

Review Quotes

Praise for What Endures

"What Endures is a wry book of fraught dinner parties that lead to lawsuits, savagely remote teenagers, and midlife brain surgery. Pauline Holdstock explores small acts of charity and small magic tricks in the Sunday fields of memory, and the results are funny and serious, with a subtle power that accumulates like a shoplifter adding coat upon coat."
--Mark Anthony Jarman, author of Smash & Grab

Praise for Pauline Holdstock

"[The Blackbird's Song] examines questions of faith, meaning and power; [Holdstock's] investigation of these issues is profound and beautifully paced, so that despite the intensity of the subject, the momentum of the narrative never falters, the evocation of place and time having an almost cinematic immediacy."
--Times Literary Supplement

"The Blackbird's Song presents real violence in its barest form . . . The bleakness of the author's prose and the compressed power of her observation make this an extraordinary first novel on the interplay of anger, love, and duty."
--The Times

"[Here I Am! is] a moving tale about the invisibility children suffer when they are not heard and seen as their unique selves . . . Holdstock inhabits the mind of a bright, funny, and sensitive child through exuberant, playful language that doesn't mask the darkness of his life. Frankie's description of curling up on his dead mother's lap is heart-rending . . . An unforgettable story about one very special child."
--Kirkus Reviews

"[Beyond Measure]'s exploration of passion, jealousy and ambition is underlaid by riveting, macabre descriptions of human dissections witnessed by its artist protagonists. Holdstock's vivid, unflinching tale doesn't sugarcoat the casual brutality of the period, and is punctuated by startling moments of beauty."
--Publishers Weekly

"A deftly crafted and wickedly fun read from cover to cover, Confessions with Keith by novelist Pauline Holdstock is the kind of story that will linger in the mind and memory long after the book itself has been finished and set back upon the shelf."
--Midwest Book Review

About the Author

Pauline Holdstock is an internationally published novelist, short fiction writer, and essayist. Her novels have been shortlisted for a number of awards, among them the Best First Novel Award, the Giller Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Her novel Beyond Measure was the winner of the BC Book Prizes Ethel Wilson Award for Fiction. Her novels The Hunter and the Wild Girl and Confessions With Keith have each been awarded the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize.