Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club

By turns savage, biting, funny, poetic, and heartbreaking, Megan Gail Coles's debut novel rips into the inner lives of a wicked cast of characters, exposing class, gender, and racial tensions over the course of one Valentine's Day in the dead of a winter storm.  Valentine's Day, the longest day of the year.  A fierce blizzard is threatening to tear a strip off the city, while inside The Hazel restaurant a storm system of sex, betrayal, addiction, and hurt is breaking overhead. Iris, a young hostess, is forced to pull a double despite resolving to avoid the charming chef and his wealthy restaurateur wife. Just tables over, Damian, a hungover and self-loathing server, is trying to navigate a potential punch-up with a pair of lit customers who remain oblivious to the rising temperature in the dining room. Meanwhile Olive, a young woman far from her northern home, watches it all unfurl from the fast and frozen street. Through rolling blackouts, we glimpse the truth behind the shroud of scathing lies and unrelenting abuse, and discover that resilience proves most enduring in the dead of this winter's tale.

About the Author :
Megan Gail Coles is a graduate of Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, the National Theatre School of Canada, and the University of British Columbia. She is the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Poverty Cove Theatre Company, for which she has written numerous award-winning plays. Her debut short fiction collection, Eating Habits of the Chronically Lonesome, won the BMO Winterset Award, the ReLit Award, and the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, and it earned her the Writers’ Trust of Canada 5×5 Prize. Her debut novel, Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a contender for CBC Canada Reads, and it won the BMO Winterset Award. Originally from Savage Cove on the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland/ Ktaqmkuk, Megan lives in St. John’s, where she is the Executive Director of Riddle Fence and a Ph.D. candidate at Concordia University.

Review :
The lure of Coles’s often glorious use of language and the importance of reading books that do exactly what Small Game Hunting does — force the reader to face truths that have been hidden and swept away for far too long, to be made uncomfortable and prompted to think rather than be simply entertained — are reason enough to give this up-and-coming author’s new work serious consideration. What recommends this novel most is the way its author stays with her characters’ hurt, how she holds it without reverence but understands how those wounds can motivate like nothing else . . . Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club is a dark, taut, funny novel that feels for its characters’ pain while remaining caustic toward the enablers and the kinds of violence that polite society allows. A profound read, offering up perfectly crafted sentences in the thoughts of the motley cast of characters. Although Small Game Hunting is often tragic and heartbreaking, its finale offers a glimmer of hope that we are invited to be brave and wait for. The hope that sees women, both tattered and changed by the work of male violence and power, not at a loss for agency or warmth. In the end, Coles’s powerful novel is a tale of resilience. Early in Small Game Hunting, a Nigerian immigrant asks the heroine about her true origins: ‘You don’t look all white,’ he says. In other words, this is not your traditional Newfoundland novel of social isolation. Instead, Megan Gail Coles portrays the harsh existence of the islanders as emblematic of the human condition itself. The characters’ lives unfold around a fine restaurant. They are physically and emotionally crippled by their society’s devastating inequalities, the women psychologically maimed by repeated sexual assault. Coles’s narrator storms against the status quo in a kinetic novel that dazzles, challenges, and exhilarates. Beautifully fluid writing pulls the reader right in and keeps them gliding along. Fans of Rene Denfeld, Alice Sebold, and Eowyn Ivey will want to check this book out.