About
Nina Newington is an award winning author and gardener. British by birth, she lived in Hong Kong, Germany, Israel, England, Nigeria and the US before immigrating to Canada. She and her wife live in a ramshackle farmhouse on the North Mountain of Nova Scotia on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaw people. Her new novel, Cardinal Divide, is due out in September 2020 from Guernica Editions.
Blog
Email from a reader, December 2022
I got Molly’s permission to post this email. It made my day. From: Molly Young Subject: Cardinal Divide Hello – I just want to tell you how much I loved Cardinal Divide. Such a beautiful story and so well written, not over the top, simple style and dialogue. The characters who worked at Dreamcatcher and …
Last Hope Camp, December 2021 – June 2022
Starting in December 2021, I spent a little over 6 months camped out by the side of a logging road in Annapolis County with an assortment of other forest protectors. It turned out to be an epic winter, snow wise. We spelled each other as best we could. It played havoc with my writing schedule …
Continue reading “Last Hope Camp, December 2021 – June 2022”
Praise from a hero…
In April 2021 I got this email about Cardinal Divide from Joan Baxter — and saved it of course. For those who don’t know, Joan Baxter is the author of “The Mill: 50 Years of Pulp and Protest” (2017) as well as volumes of extraordinary in-depth reporting about (among many other things) forestry and …
Publications
Guernica Editions, Fall 2020
446 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN13: 9781771834421
ISBN10: 1771834420
English
$20.00 Canada, $17.95 US, £11.95 UK
A father comes out to his daughter as a woman. Or at least, he was once a woman. It’s complicated. Funny. Painful. Eventually joyful. Meanwhile the daughter, who was adopted, has her own identity issues. At the Aboriginal addictions treatment centre where she works, everyone assumes she is indigenous. But is she? How can she find out? Cardinal Divide explores the hunger for certainty and the mutability of identity, whether of gender, race or sexuality. Authenticity isn’t simple. Acting as somebody else is simultaneously a way to deceive and to explore the world. Characters who pass as male, as white, as straight, straddle the cardinal divides. And then, sometimes, passing is becoming.
https://www.guernicaeditions.com/title/9781771834421 Free shipping in Canada
My first novel:
Through stunning, magnetic, precise prose, Newington paints the portrait of a world both gorgeous and terrifying; we are taken into the consciousness of the daughter of a British diplomat during the Nigerian Civil War, a child trying to puzzle through the mysteries of family, culture, gender, and place. There are no conclusions here; the world reveals itself in its bafflement, its losses and betrayals, counterbalanced by moments of beauty that assuage, delight, and fascinate. This is a beautiful book! — Carol Potter, poet, Antioch University
Where Bones Dance TLS review 2007