ORDER HERE, at your local bookstore, or Amazon
What You Get at Home won the High Plains Award in the short story category in 2013. Article here.
Her collection is “immensely satisfying and personal in a way you don’t often find in contemporary fiction” (Billings Gazette)
“illuminating and sympathetic portrayals… the ultimate pleasure of reading [this book] is the author’s creative prose… Everything about [this book] is engaging…” (Rhubarb)
Shortlisted for 2 Manitoba Book Awards: the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction and the Carol Shields Winnipeg Award.
Dora Dueck uncovers the beauty in memory in What You Get at Home, introducing readers to the power of the familiar. Renewing, remaking, and revisiting is something we often take for granted, but Dueck does it with superb style and grace. Readers will hear about families, communities, and parents we all think we know — and give us a shade of sensibility we hadn’t yet considered. She reminds us to hold onto what we believe and understand best, for it is in our deepest, known places that we find our most beautiful homes of all. (Jury, Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction 2013)
One of the “Best of the best” of 2012 at Winnipeg Free Press and on McNally Robinson’s top ten Manitoba Bestsellers for 2012.
This collection of my short fiction launched in Winnipeg October 2, 2012. (Launch described here, book described below.)
REVIEWS
First one out! A lovely thumbs up from the Winnipeg Free Press! The reviewer praised its “beautifully evocative portrayals” and called it “reminiscent in style and imagery…of Margaret Laurence.” These are “beautiful, wise stories of loss, of suffering and of fleeing one home for another…[of] survival, family and love.” Read the whole review here.
And then these:
When your last book (This Hidden Thing) wins Manitoba Book of the Year, your next work faces significant performance pressure; Dueck’s What You Get at Home lives up to it. This short story collection delves deep into the hearts of its Mennonite characters, the final 7 stories following Liese, a Paraguayan immigrant to Canada. “My Name Is Magdalena,” a beautifully devastating account of one woman’s flight from Russia, will resonate with MB Herald obituary readers. In contrast to the view of the narrator in “Chopsticks,” who has “no idea what we might say that would get at the truth of our losses,” every story – whether about a father’s Alzeimer’s disease, a child’s disappearance, or a granddaughter’s homosexuality – “gets at the truth” in profoundly moving and poetic ways. It turns out What You Get at Home is a desire to read through the night. — MB Herald Read whole review here.
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“Dueck’s stories in this collection are deftly written and finely nuanced: each character, each situation and event seems convincingly real. Tiny washes of emotion colour a routine scene. Motivations tip incidents into unexpected directions. And sorrow, anger and jealousy intrude in ways we would all find familiar…” Review in Roots and Branches, read whole review here.
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D. Nighswander blog: “the characters engaged me….I feel like I know myself better.”
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“Developing deep characters with surprisingly few words, Dora draws the reader into the worlds of these characters…one feels immediately and intimately connected.” Mennonite Historian
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Review at Prairie Fire: “very satisfying”
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ORDER at your local bookstore, Turnstone Press, or Amazon. More information at Turnstone Press.
Full of longing and melancholy, the stories in What You Get at Home find comfort and understanding in the unlikeliest of places. In “The Rocking Chair” a piece of furniture simultaneously divides a family and heals old wounds. The narrator in the title story finds a sense of belonging and purpose in a small pool of light and her favourite book. In “Chopsticks” a piano in a personal care home reminds a woman of the sense of wonder and admiration she had for her father as a child. With the power of memory the characters that inhabit What You Get at Home find the strength to carry on when life is at its most challenging.
Dora Dueck’s work is immensely satisfying and dazzling in a way that you often don’t find in fiction today. She takes the time to delve deeply into the souls of the people she writes about, to find the perfect word, phrase, cadence, that will bring to life their journeys toward peace and beauty. Dora is a sage and marvellous writer, and one of Manitoba’s best kept secrets.
—Sandra Birdsell, author of The Russländer
Borrowing Bones 