Black Dove

Colin McAdam

ISBN: 9781641294225

Published: February 2023

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Hardcover $26.00

eBook $14.99

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Colin McAdam

Toronto

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Description

A deeply imaginative and thrilling novel about grief, single parenting, and the terrifying power of a child's imagination, dancing on an edge between magical realism and horror, perfect for fans of Stranger Things

In a tall and narrow house, on a stained and busy street, live twelve-year-old Oliver and his father, a story-loving writer...

A deeply imaginative and thrilling novel about grief, single parenting, and the terrifying power of a child’s imagination, dancing on an edge between magical realism and horror, perfect for fans of Stranger Things

In a tall and narrow house, on a stained and busy street, live twelve-year-old Oliver and his father, a story-loving writer. Haunted by the ghost of his alcoholic mother, Oliver finds comfort in his father’s impromptu tales: the Black Dove, an elusive flower that gives strength; the girl who consumes it as she battles attackers and yearns for happier realms. Stories where lonely souls keep searching despite their losses and grief.

Running from a bully one night, Oliver hides in a junk shop owned by an enigmatic man. Soon, instead of hiding in the janitor’s closet after school, Oliver spends afternoons in the shop, a cavernous place full of storied oddities and grubby wonders where creatures rise up from the basement. A snake in the shape of a boy. A hunter named Night, part panther, part hound, who proves to Oliver that the world holds invisible wonder.

Wanting to forget his mother, afraid of his own genes, constantly harassed by bullies, Oliver joins the shop owner in experimenting with dangerous forms of genetic editing. Meanwhile, he meets the girl from across the street, and their friendship grows in a neighbourhood where magic is real, where murderers gather, and where the darker consequences of fantasies play out.

A twisting story of grief and revenge, Black Dove is a thrilling read with its own kind of magic. In rich but tightly reined prose, McAdam celebrates the value and shortfalls of storytelling, finding a light in all the darkness to conjure a tender portrait of childhood’s end.

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“Colin McAdam conjures, in intoxicating prose, a grief-haunted boy offered a kind of Mephistophelean deal by a contemporary Dr. Moreau. Black Dove is tenderly nightmarish and toughly tender—a divine tale of yearning and revenge served up red-hot and with a side of broken hearts.”
–Zsuzsi Gartner, Scotiabank Giller Prize-shortlisted author of The Beguiling
Black Dove is an eerie, unsettling, fabulous book. McAdam leads the reader through quotidian and mythical realms with absolute assurance. Stark and beautiful, horrifying and lyrical, its pages thrum with flight, transformation, grief, revenge, transcendence, the remorseless power of stories and the very nature of creation. Ever since reading, Black Dove has drifted in and out of my dreams.”
–Helen Macdonald, author of The New York Times bestselling H Is For Hawk