In this new collection of ten stories, Sharon Butala once again demonstrates why she
ranks among our finest short story writers. Her unforgettable style - spare but intense, indelible in its drawing of character - brings these stories to life in quiet but powerful ways.
Real Life resonates with the same authenticity and strength that characterized her last award-winning story collection, Fever.
Set in western Canada, familiar Butala territory, these stories of women in moments of crisis - a dying sister, a failing marriage, a love lost, a random act of violence that changes a life forever - are compelling and unsentimental. Yet there are threads of common experience that reach from story to story and create a web of universal experience: the pain of losing love and the sense of personal failure that accompanies it; the ways in which poverty can destroy the human spirit; the reality and demands of death; the joy that children can bring. Butala's women are scarred but resilient. They face what the future brings with both wisdom and hope, recognizing in other women and the men in their lives the challenge of finding and keeping happiness.
Critics have found in the writing of Sharon Butala a steady light that both uncovers and illuminates human experience. Real Life captures well the emotional risks that we must face as part of loving. What is real about these stories is Butala's unwavering faith in the ultimate goodness of the human heart.