Winner of the 2021 Governor General's Literary Award! A short story collection illuminating Inuit experience south of the tundra
Drawing on both lived experience and cultural memory, Norma Dunning brings together six powerful new short stories centred on modern-day Inuk characters in Tainna. Ranging from homeless to extravagantly wealthy, from spiritual to jaded, young to elderly, and even from alive to deceased, Dunning's characters are united by shared feelings of alienation, displacement and loneliness resulting from their experiences in southern Canada.
In Tainna-meaning "the unseen ones" and pronounced Da-e-nn-a-a fraught reunion between sisters Sila and Amak ends in an uneasy understanding. From the spirit realm, Chevy Bass watches over his imperilled grandson, Kunak. And in the title story, the broken-hearted Bunny wanders onto a golf course on a freezing night, when a flock of geese stand vigil until her body is discovered by a kind stranger.
Norma Dunning's masterful storytelling uses humour and incisive detail to create compelling characters who discover themselves in a hostile land where prejudice, misogyny and inequity are most often found hidden in plain sight. There, they must rely on their wits, artistic talent, senses of humour and spirituality for survival; and there, too, they find solace in shining moments of reconnection with their families and communities.
A new collection of short stories that illuminate Inuit experience in the Canadian South.
“While reading the stories individually is a significant experience, the true potency of the collection is cumulative.
Tainna is less a collection of stories than it is the parts of a world, fragile and broken but powerful and dazzling all the same.” -
Quill & Quire
“Dunning’s tone throughout the book is candid and colloquial...each [short] story uses a slightly different voice, and that’s where we see the elegance in Dunning’s craft as a writer...raw and profound...Readers will quickly realize that Tainna is a work of real-life fiction. The characters may be fabricated but the stories are undoubtedly ones of many truths. Tainna will break your heart, mend it, and break it again.” -Room Magazine
"Tainna is a heartrending collection, portraying complex, three-dimensional characters who search for not only survival, but also for hope amid moments of family and community. Highly recommended..." -Midwest Book Review
"Tainna hit me right in the heart… my body responds to reading these stories” -Angie Abdou, Daybreak Alberta, CBC Radio One
