Silent Cruise

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

Timothy Taylor is a Vancouver writer whose bestselling novel Stanley
Park was nominated for the 2001 Giller Prize. He has captured several
awards for his short fiction (including the 2000 Journey Prize and a
National Magazine Award), and he’s the only writer ever with three
stories in the same edition of The Journey Prize Anthology.

Taylor’s masterful storytelling skills are on full display in the
eight stories and novella that make up this debut anthology. “Silent
Cruise,” the signature piece about a modernized approach to racetrack
handicapping, is somewhat of a diamond in the rough compared with the
burnished gems in the rest of the collection. In “Doves of
Townshend,” a woman searching for rare collectibles in the trash and
trinkets of flea markets learns that a metamorphosis can occur for more
than the beauty of butterflies. This fragility gives way to the
brutishness of “Smoke’s Fortune,” in which two inept country boys
waving hunks of raw meat crash about in a junkyard in an effort to trap
and shoot a “half-crazy old Doberman, mad at the world and hungry.”
“Francisco’s Watch” is as finely crafted a piece of fiction as the
Movado timepiece a philandering son loses along with his marriage.

In “The Pope’s Own,” the lady of the butterflies resurfaces, now
in therapy and competing in a complex bidding war with two brothers for
a church-owned, cheese-making dairy farm in Ireland. In “Prayers to
Buxtehude,” a young suitor learns the hard way that silence is golden
when he babbles to his fiancée about the disastrous end to his
childhood crush on his piano teacher. “The Boar’s Head Easter” is
the poignant story of a Vancouver son’s search for his unknown birth
father in a Chicago of “old clothes, cars, cardboard boxes and the
gutted carcasses of household appliances.” The novella, “NewStart
2.0,” presents the cyberspace adventures of two madcap high-school
students from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.

The bottom line is that this book is well worth owning.