All Saints - K.D. Miller

Shortlisted for the 2014 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
Longlisted for the 2014 Frank O'Connor Award

In a linked collection that presents the secret small tragedies of an Anglican congregation struggling to survive,All Saintsdelves into the life of Simon, the Reverend, and the lives of his parishioners: Miss Alice Vipond, a refined and elderly schoolteacher, incarcerated for a horrendous crime; a woman driven to extreme anxiety by an affair she cannot end; a receptionist, and her act of improbable generosity; a writer making peace with her divorce. Effortlessly written and candidly observed,All Saintsis a moving collection of tremendous skill, whose intersecting stories illuminate the tenacity and vulnerability of modern-day believers.

Praise forAll Saints

"Fictional places have been mostly secular of late: the home, the bar, the workplace. Standing at the centre of K.D. Miller's touching and intimate collection of linked stories is, unfashionably, a church. All Saints is not just the setting for the habits and rituals of this motley group?parishioners, priest, passersby?but the central image that gives these stories their poignancy. As obsolescence threatens the church, it also puts in peril the connections each character has to others at the very time the world so badly needs human connections.All Saintsis a moving and soulful book."?Caroline Adderson