A Reluctant Mother

Honest, sometimes humorous and often tragic, Frida’ s narrative tells a modern tale of a conflagration of deceit, adultery, regret and love. AWARDS FOR DORE’ S PREVIOUS WORK • The Journey Prize • Western Magazines Gold Award for Fiction • Short Grain Award • Best Canadian Stories selection Frida and her husband Blake have chosen not to have children. Concentrating on her artistic career instead, Frida has mostly managed to accept this difficult decision while putting her own traumatic childhood behind her. That is, until a stranger knocks on their door with a child she insists is Blake’ s daughter. From that moment on their fragile marriage, their lives are devastatingly changed forever. In Frida, Deirdre Simon Dore’ s evocative writing has created a difficult, blunt and vitally genuine “ reluctant mother.” A contemporary novel of a woman whose relationships are an exercise in hilarity and tragedy both.

Deirdre Simon Dore is a Canadian writer. Her short fiction has won, among other awards, the Journey Prize and has been published in numerous journals and translated into Italian. Her plays have been produced in Vancouver and Calgary. Originally from New York and a graduate of Boston University, she has an MFA in creative writing from UBC. After homesteading on a island in B.C., she moved inland and acquired a woodlot licence on which she planted trees and learned to use a chainsaw. She lives near a lake in interior BC with her husband, black lab and assorted livestock. She has two children.