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Karen Hofmann’s empathetic and cathartic novel, What is Going to Happen Next, pieces together the lives of five members of the Lund family following their enforced dispersal after the death of the father and the hospitalization of the mother in the remote West Coast community of Butterfly Lake. It explores their self-doubts and aspirations in the ways they cope with their separation and reunion through their work and personal relationships, and reveals the ways in which their past is filtered through memory and desire.

The Widow’s Fire explores the shadow side of Jane Austen’s final novel Persuasion, disrupting its happy ending and throwing moral certainties off balance. We join the action close to the moment when Austen draws away for the last time and discretely gives an overview of the oncoming marriage between heroine Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth. This, it transpires in The Widow’s Fire, is merely the beginning of a journey. Soon dark undercurrents disturb the order and symmetry of Austen’s world. The gothic flavor of the period, usually satirized by Austen, begins to assert itself.

The stories in this collection are unifed by a sense of dislocation. In each of the pieces, there is an underlying element of disturbance and disharmony. Resolution threads its way through the narratives while the characters struggle to navigate conscious choices and come to terms with new realities. A perspective that views the complexity of life journeys as a manifestation of intentional decisions, circumstances beyond one’s control, and the need to reflect upon the combination of both in order to become fully realized, drives the narrative voices.

After ten years of marriage, Sue and Jerry would say they know everything about each other. But each harbours a significant secret. When Jerry becomes ill and it’s apparent he’s dying, Sue visits a psychic, Hans, who tells her there is someone like a son in her life. She dismisses this, but at Jerry’s funeral his son turns up—a son Sue didn’t know existed.  At first Sue feels betrayed by Jerry, but gradually she accepts her own complicity. And she regrets never telling him, or anyone else, about the baby girl she gave up for adoption when she herself was only sixteen.

Mohammed is an aggressive, dominant character who bullies his wife and four children and wages paranoiac diatribes against his sister and her family. It is only when Mohammed leaves for work every morning that the house relaxes into the rich interconnectivity of familial relationships: between Mohammed’s gentle wife Fatima and his sister Rana, who yearns desperately to contribute to this historic fight for freedom; between the twelve-year old twins and Rana’s gentle son Mazin, whose effeminacy is a source of great anxiety to her.

At ten, Melody Sparks, better known as Baby Girl, is excited to move to the tropical island of Trinidad with her single-parent dad, but she silently longs for her mother, a woman she can’t recall ever meeting and doesn’t have a photo of. She fits in to her new life in Paradise Lane quite well: she loves her school and makes new friends. However, her longing for blood family remains strong. But Baby Girl is suddenly and unexpectedly uprooted from her comfortable life in Paradise Lane by and forced to reside in Flat Hill Village, a depressed, crime-ridden community.

Esa Withrod is a young woman struggling over recent events in her personal life—a failed first relationship and resulting pregnancy—as well as the legacy of her desolate upbringing. Eccentric and enigmatic, Esa’s childhood has prepared her to deal with the world with endurance and resilience, but not with joy. She remains “mystified by kindness” and the friendship offered to her by her employer, Merle, a cartographer, and his partner, Daniel.

Over the years Trish and Ray have forged a stable family life, despite a rocky beginning almost twenty years earlier — living with their friends on a communal farm that ended badly. Now they are all coming to terms with life in their forties, but Trish has turned angry and insecure. She suddenly finds herself faced with an ailing marriage, a teenaged daughter who would prefer to live with her alcoholic grandmother than at home, and an annoying half sister, Olive, who Trish has been taught to believe is no blood relation.

Bunny Best has met her unfortunate end after a mishap at a Gay Days parade. Now her two sons, Kyle and Hamilton, have the task of arranging her funeral and caring for her most beloved companion, a troublesome Italian greyhound named Enzo. In the bustle of obituary-writing, eulogy-giving, and dog-sitting, sibling rivalry quickly reaches its peak and years of buried contentions surface.

Harry Sullivan hasn't seen his son Drew in thirteen years, and now Drew is coming to Harry's Saskatchewan ranch for a visit. This poignant comedy tells the story of two men who are too stubborn to give in to feelings of the heart.