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.
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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