Books
The Voyageur (Swift Press, 2024; Éditions Globe, 2027)
Alex is an orphaned stockboy eking out a meagre living in 1830s Montreal when he meets Serge, a drunken fur trader who promises a life of adventure in the wilderness of British North America. But their expedition quickly goes awry, and Alex is shot in the gut during a trading post robbery. Very loosely based on real-life fur trader Alexis St. Martin, The Voyageur is historical fiction by way of magic realism and body horror. Ottawa Book Award finalist.
“The Voyageur is a marvellous work of art, brutal, tender and deeply moving. It has many of the qualities of Cormac McCarthy at his ferocious best, without the excesses of the late American master. The narrative is set in history, but the novel triumphantly surpasses the constrictions of a genre label.”
John Banville, Booker and Franz Kafka Prize–winning author of The Sea
The High-Rise in Fort Fierce (Goose Lane Editions, 2018)
The tiny town of Fort Fierce has issues in spades, and most of them fester in Franklin Place, the high-rise by the lake. In this collection of linked stories, we meet the Franklin family, three generations of landlords, each more paranoid and alienated than the last. Then we meet their tenants: a drug dealer, a lonely bigot, a political activist, a struggling father, an itinerant sex offender, and a woman who refuses to give into it all. They wander in and out of one another’s lives with little in common but the building and the mould behind its walls. Ottawa Book Award finalist and ReLit Award finalist.
“The mess of humanity that resides in The High-Rise in Fort Fierce—the weirdos and the outsiders, the brave and the bewildered, the ruined and the barely redeemed—are transformed through the blast furnace of Paul Carlucci’s immense talent into something transfixing, their raw hope and hopelessness depicted unflinchingly.”
Zsuzsi Gartner, Giller Prize– and Writers’ Trust–shortlisted author of The Beguiling and Better Living Through Plastic Explosives
A Plea for Constant Motion (House of Anansi, 2017)
Penetrating and visceral, yet always offset by small moments of tenderness and humour, A Plea for Constant Motion is a powerful examination of the innate desire in everyone to change their lives and strive for something better. Two couples share a disastrous dinner after their children are killed in a botched kidnapping overseas. A teacher with a passion for cartography orchestrates a bizarre apology after hitting a student. Desperate to be friends, a man ignores his neighbour’s strange behaviour to the peril of himself and others. A young girl babysits for a family friend, dimly aware that her presence is required for more than just childcare. The characters in these stories find themselves confronted by situations that leave them either struggling to escape or firmly rooted in place. ReLit Award finalist.
“Paul Carlucci’s collection thrums with violence. The damaged, deranged, and dangerous are flayed open on the page by vivid, razor-sharp prose.”
Laura Trunkey, author of Double Dutch
The Secret Life of Fission (Oberon Press, 2013)
In a series of bracing stories set across Canada, The Secret Life of Fission takes readers into the complicated lives of loners and outcasts. A young couple in Toronto clumsily fiddle with sexual experimentation to better fit into counterculture. Devastated after a failed real estate investment, a divorced father tries to teach his son a muddled lesson about evolution. And the politics of a small, Northern town are laid bare after a man falls off his motorcycle on the community’s main drag. Danuta Gleed Literary Award winner.
“The Secret Life of Fission delivers the explosiveness alluded to in its title – sharp-edged language and a kind of flying apart. Nothing gentle here: families and relationships are either in the midst of blowing apart or else already hopelessly broken, and all is portrayed with a careful, almost dissected language that prevents the reader from glancing away.”
Danuta Gleed Literary Award jury