Seep

Fiction. Most Anticipated 2015 Fiction Pick, 49th Shelf. Dwight Eliot was born on a baseball diamond, during a dugout- clearing brawl between his hometown team, The Seep Selects, and a team of barnstorming Cuban All Stars. Decades later, when he sees his childhood home being moved on a truck down the highway, he begins a quest to research the history of his hometown and of his family. SEEP is being dismantled, and the land is being redeveloped as a master-planned recreational townsite to complement a nearby First Nations casino. And then his brother Darryl arrives on his doorstep with the force of a bus crash. In the face of the town's erasure, he tries to preserve its stories; so doing, he comes to question his own. SEEP limns the tension between land development and landscape, trauma and nostalgia, dysfunction and intimacy in a narrative of twenty-first century Canada.
Mark Giles assuredly steps in the footsteps of his predecessors who so engagingly limned the Alberta prairie: W.O. Mitchell, Henry Kreisel, W.P. Kinsella, and Robert Kroetsch. Giles' SEEP is a wickedly wonderful account of how our senses of self and of place can be interrelated, with the swirl of emotions involved in each part of the equation making for a complicated world and illuminating fiction.--Tom Wayman
Praise for Mark's previous title, Knucklehead & Other Stories:

Elegant riddles dressed in workaday clothes, puzzles of image and event whose solutions cut to the heart of being human in a world of perils... There's not a word or image that fails to contribute to Giles purpose.--The Globe & Mail
Giles' style is polished and assured throughout... Knucklehead is a solid debut.--Quill & Quire