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list price: $19.95
edition:Paperback
category: Fiction
published: Mar 2023
ISBN:9780889844568
publisher: Porcupine's Quill

Morse Code for Romantics

by Anne Baldo

tagged: short stories (single author), literary
Description

In Anne Baldo's Morse Code for Romantics, patterns of life emerge—and break—in relationships both requited and otherwise. A restaurateur orchestrates a devious punishment for his wife's lover. A desperate mother searches for her missing daughter, a modern-day Persephone who was lured away by a sinister boyfriend. An islander falls under the spell of a visiting researcher, whose insidious smiles and natural sangfroid mirror the serpent-like sea monster he hunts.

These wistful, darkly surreal stories, set in Southern Ontario, suggest that maternal instinct is not just a chemical lie but something bloody and painful; that one person's clouds can rain on generations; and that true loneliness can be as clear as code written on a face, and as ominous as a dark, monstrous shape lurking beneath the surface.

About the Author
Anne Baldo

Anne Baldo's short fiction has appeared in a number of publications, including Broken Pencil, Carousel Magazine, Hermine, Qwerty and SubTerrain. Her creative nonfiction piece "Expecting" was longlisted for the 2019 CBC Nonfiction Prize. Morse Code for Romantics is her first collection. She lives in Windsor, Ontario.

Editorial Reviews

For the most part, these are standalone stories--the exceptions are a handful in which characters reappear--but they're linked by geography, by recurring imagery, and themes which make this collection such a satisfying book. They're linked too by being crafted to a standard of real excellence, and I'm thinking of the image on the book's cover, of the power lines connecting the utility poles, without which I'd probably be employing a metaphor right now along the lines of beads on a string, one gleaming gem right after another.

— Pickle Me This

'Throughout, Baldo's prose shines. Her writing effectively evokes a world that is familiar and strange at the same time, pulling the reader into lives scarred by loss and loneliness. These are poignant, wise, memorable stories by a writer whose vision may be bleak, but it's a vision that rings true on every page.'

— The Miramichi Reader
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