After Light spans four generations of the Garrison family, over the course of the twentieth century. Irish Deirdre, forced into marriage at sixteen, never stops trying to regain her freedom, though her ruthless escape attempts threaten to destroy her family. Her son, Frank, raised in Brooklyn, is a talented young artist, until he's blinded in WW2. With fierce determination, Frank forges a new life for himself, but the war has shaken him deeply. His two daughters, rebellious Von and sensitive Rosheen, grow up as isolated as the hothouse roses their mother breeds on the frozen Canadian prairie, and like the roses, they have scant protection against the violent elements that imperil them. Rosheen's son, Kyle, raised without his mother, knows nothing of the family's history until 1999, when he and Von gather Rosheen's art works for an exhibit at a Brooklyn gallery. The story of the Garrisons is shaped by powerful forces - -a rogue north wind, a vengeful orphan, a sugar-dust explosion, an airborne jar of peaches, a scar that refuses to heal, a terrible lie, an unexpected baby, and a desperate drive across treacherous ice. Despite all the their tragedies, the creative fire that drives the Garrisons survives, burning more and more brightly as it's passed from one generation to the next, into the twenty-first century.
About the Author: Poet and novelist Catherine Hunter has published three collections of poetry, Necessary Crimes, Lunar Wake, and Latent Heat (which won the Manitoba Book of the Year Award); three thrillers, Where Shadows Burn, The Dead of Midnight, and Queen of Diamonds (Ravenstone Press); the novella In the First Early Days of My Death; and the spoken word CD Rush Hour (Cyclops Press), which includes a bonus track featuring The Weakerthans. Two of her novels have been translated into German. Her essays, reviews, and poems appear in many journals and anthologies, including Essays on Canadian Writing, The Malahat Review, West Coast Line, Prairie Fire, CV2, The Echoing Years: Contemporary Poetry from Canada and Ireland, and Best Canadian Poems 2013. She edited Before the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier, and for ten years she was the editor of The Muses' Company press. She teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Winnipeg.
