"Pick any place you like. Go ahead pick a place and I will long for it to be home." This poetic novel, by turns playful and poignant, follows a family across a continent, through generations, around a city, and into language to find the place that is home. A striking debut novel.

Wendy McGrath's most recent novel Broke City is the final book in her Santa Rosa Trilogy. Previous novels in the series are Santa Rosa and North East. Her most recent book of poetry, A Revision of Forward, was released in Fall 2015. McGrath works in multiple genres. BOX (CD) 2017 is an adaptation of her long poem into spoken word/experimental jazz/noise by QUARTO & SOUND. MOVEMENT 1 from that CD was nominated for a 2018 Edmonton Music Award (Jazz Recording of the Year). She recently completed a collaborative manuscript of poems inspired by the photography of Danny Miles, drummer for July Talk and Tongue Helmet. Her poetry, fiction, and non-fiction has been widely published. Wendy lives in Edmonton, Alberta, on Treaty Six Territory.

Wendy McGrath's profile page

• Alberta Book Publishing Awards - Book Design of the Year

"McGrath dares to be different in Recurring Fictions by giving the novel a rhythm that's unique.... We're also given the story of a working-class Western Canadian family searching for a place to call home. It's the yearning for home and the desire to be on the move toward it that gives this book much of its power.... It's a rich book that demands it be read more than once.... [W]e now have a new, poetic novelist whose voice is one to be savoured." Marc Horton, The Edmonton Journal, July 7/02

"A brave and compelling first book." - Susan Rudy

In this compelling narrative all parts, dialogue, description, plot, operate as image clusters which gather momentum as the book develops.. [McGrath] uses implosive poetry to shape an emotion-laden story. - Terry Goldie

"Recurring Fictions is definitely worth a read, and a reread. I look forward to more works from McGrath." Andrea Kopylech, Legacy Magazine

"McGrath paints an engaging and moving picture of the hardships endured by so many early Canadians who struggled to survive in a cold and unforgiving environment." Lynne Perras, Canadian Book Review Annual, 2004

"The 'Recurring Fictions' in poet Wendy McGrath's first novel concern ancestral ghosts, dreams, train rides, dwelling places, and domestic scenes in a troubled family's life together, especially as precipitated by an absent father mortally afflicted by tobacco and alcohol....The lyrical vignettes so often sustain metaphor and allusion that the short book will benefit from a study of linked imagery, more so than narrative." Ervin Beck, World Literature Today

"A self-consciously literary novel in the best sense, it explores the way home yokes together alienation and belonging." Christopher Wiebe, Vue Weekly

"...McGrath's writing is strong and convincing.... Pick any page in the book and you will find poetic fragments, a story, but not a complete story; threads of story, a dream or image, a cryptic message like an advice column on the bottom of the page, small notes." kath macLean, Prairie Fire

Reading

"The jurors were particularly delighted by the manner in which the design reflected the text of this book, and its marvellous use of space." BPAA Awards