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This unsettling novel is set thirty years in the future, in the wake of a third world war. Runaway effects of climate change have triggered the collapse of nation/states and wiped out over a third of the global population. One of the survivors, a former soldier nicknamed Mercy, suffers from PTSD and is haunted by guilt and lingering memories of his family. His pain is eased when he meets a dancer named Ruby, a performer who breathes new life into his carefully constructed existence. But when his long-lost brother Leo arrives with news that Mercy's children have been spotted, the two brothers travel into the wilderness to look for them, only to find that the line between truth and lies is trespassed, challenging Mercy's own moral code about the things that matter amid the wreckage of war and tragedy.Set against a sparse yet fantastical landscape, The Mercy Journals explores the parameters of personal morality and forgiveness at this watershed moment in humanity's history and evolution.Claudia Casper's previous novels include The Reconstruction (St. Martin's Press) .



About the Author

Claudia Casper

Claudia Casper's best-selling first novel, The Reconstruction, was the object of a bidding war, and was published in Canada, U.S., U.K., and Germany. It is currently being adapted for a 3D feature film co-production in France. Her second novel, The Continuation of Love by Other Means, was short-listed for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her third novel, The Mercy Journals, is already creating buzz on the west coast of Canada and the U.S. months before publication. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia with her husband.

"I can't imagine trying to understand anything about the life or world or time we find ourselves in without writing. I write 6 days a week, at least 6 hours a day, (distraction and procrastination included) and have done so my whole adult life. I start every book with themes I want to explore as deeply as I am capable. I write a first draft in about a year and then spend several years rewriting. Rewriting involves: discovering the unique shape of the novel, deepening all the characters and their relationship to each other, holding a tuning fork to the world and checking the manuscript for false notes, removing as much dead wood and automatic thinking as possible, writing towards courage and honesty without shaving off irony, humour, and idiosyncratic flourishes. Marilynne Robinson, Kurt Vonnegut, Shakespeare, E. Annie Proulx, David Mitchell, D.M. Coetzee - all writers whose work I reflect on when I'm writing. My latest novel, The Mercy Journals, took eight years to write. I needed to enter a kind of madness to write it. I left nothing on the floor. It is the best novel I could write for this moment in history. I wanted it to be intense, dramatic, intimate, new, mythic, and relevant. I wanted not to waste a second of my reader's time."



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