So This Is Love: Lollipop and Other Stories

Adroitly capturing love and all its nuances, So This Is Love pulsates with underlying currents of violence, sex, passion, and the politics of desire. Tracing the globe, individuals find themselves caught in the entanglements of memory, forgetting, and the imminent future. In an overcrowded hospital in war-torn Bosnia, a Muslim soldier and a young Serbian woman---one crippled, the other blind---find solace in each other. In small-town Ontario, a father and daughter relive the summer when an ethereal girl entered their lives and a brutal assault changed everything. In an apartment peopled with an eclectic mix of bohemian expatriates, a man pursues a young suicidal waif at the height of the sexual revolution in 1970s Paris. So this is love. In sparkling, insightful prose, Gilbert Reid's provocative debut collection of short stories takes the reader on a journey through war zones, bohemian apartments, idyllic rural farms, and the dark streets of Rome. Madly romantic, subtly subversive, and utterly accomplished, So This Is Love is at times morose, at times perverse, at times beautiful, but always honest.

About the Author :
Gilbert Reid is a film, television, and radio producer, and writer. Recently nominated for a Gemini Award for Best Documentary Writing for Storming the Ridge, he has worked on film projects with Marcello Mastroianni and others, and he has served on a number of film juries, including the Prix Vercorin in Switzerland. He worked as a diplomat in London and Rome, as an economist in Paris, and as a university lecturer in Sicily. He lives in Toronto.

Review :
"Powerfully rendered and suspenseful." ---Joyce Carol Oates "A mastery of diverse human voices." ---"The Globe and Mail""" "Love is perhaps the most difficult subject of all, yet Gilbert Reid writes about it with understanding, kindness, and a very sharp eye. In spare and elegant prose, he shows different sorts of love and lovers, from war-torn Bosnia to rural Ontario. His short stories are in the great traditions of Alice Munro or Mavis Gallant." ---Margaret MacMillan, author of "Paris"" 1919" "An unerring and compelling examination of aggression and compassion." ---"The ""Vancouver"" Sun " "In every story, readers engage with an intelligent and observant narrator who...plays with expectations, flipping context or subject in fun or inventive ways.... This eclectic collection reads a bit like a series of one-night stands." ---Q"uill & Quire "