Beneath that starry place

Maybe it's winter now, and you're a boy, too. After you've flung yourself over the cliff of day into sleep, you're suddenly awake again and you rise in a silver and moonstruck night on the edge of a small town, the snowy outskirts a vast canvas to be filled with the darks and lights of the shadowy world outside your bedroom window. You sense your mother in the room, and look around once to see. You are used to this, she comes in often to check on you. She smiles but says nothing, and you continue to sit, feet pressed against a heating vent for warmth, waiting for rabbits to come and nibble on the willow branches that dance stiff and cold above the snow. To make sense of who he is, Nathan must reconstruct the imagined fragments of his past and the people who define him. His grandfather, Eamon, a master of disguises, an actor and a swindler, larger than myth itself, both attracts and repels the young Nathan. His grandmother, Madeleine, has an astronomer's knowledge of the stars; strength and delicacy are the signature on everything she touches. His romantic and playful father, Ryan, laments that with his own childhood long past he must surrender his fantasies of being a dog; from him, Nathan learns to locate another self in the soul of a wild animal. And Nathan's mother, Allison, leaves on her son the indelible imprint of her impulsiveness, her ingenuity--and her fear. Beneath that Starry Place is a mesmerizing debut novel by a remarkable writer. With unflinching insight, Terry Jordan takes his readers into the very stuff of remembrance and the construction of self. In prose that is by turns stark, melodious, lyrical and sensuous, Jordan reveals himself as the master of the imaginative journey. Beneath that Starry Place resonates with raw emotion and pure narrative energy. "Jordan's stories occupy a little-travelled territory somewhere between plausibility and surrealism. The vivid patchwork of events mimic the workings of memory ... scenes and images that linger like movie dust." - The Toronto Star "Terry Jordan puts it all on the page: the fury of raw emotion, the terror of childhood, the betrayal of love, the unpredictability of life. His writing has the edge and finess of a sharp skate-blade on virgin ice, the ripping strength of a bulldozer." - CBC Radio A Phyllis Bruce Book Terry Jordan is an award-winning writer and dramatist whose It's a Hard Cow won the Saskatchewan Book Award in 1994 and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize. He was the first Margaret Laurence Fellow at Trent University in 1996. His stories have been widely published and featured on CBC Radio, and his award-winning plays, Reunion, Movie Dust and Close Your Eyes, have been produced across the country. Terry Jordan lives in Allan, Saskatchewan.