Confessions with Keith
Winner of the 2023 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize
An outrageously comic novel documents a middle-aged writer and mother's grappling with mid-life crisis—her husband's and her own.
Preoccupied with her fledgling literary career, intent on the all-consuming consolations of philosophy, and scrambling to meet the demands of her four children, the acutely myopic and chronically inattentive Vita Glass doesn’t notice that her house and her marriage are competing to see which can fall apart fastest. She can barely find time for her writing career, and just when her newfound success in vegetable erotica is beginning to take off. Our heroine’s only tried and trusted escape is the blissful detachment of Keith's hairdressing salon, but when her husband leaves the country, unannounced, she decides to do likewise—in the opposite direction, and with their children. Drawn from the pages of Vita’s journal, this outrageously comic novel documents Vita's passage through a mid-life crisis and explores all the ways we deceive each other and ourselves.
Pauline Holdstock is an award winning novelist, short fiction writer and essayist. Her books have been published in the US, the UK, Australia, Germany, Brazil and Portugal. In Canada, her work has been short-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, and others, and has won the BC Book Prizes Award for Fiction and the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize. She lives on Vancouver Island.
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