Never’s Just the Echo of Forever
$24.95
Book One of the Sweetwater Calhoun Series
Albie Starbach, a 34-year-old school crossing guard and caretaker of a large rooming house, lives in a world that is, with the exception of his mother, threatening and explosive: spectral gunslingers hang from the trees singing to him; in their basement apartment his astonishing mother walks on her hands, with crippled legs dancing in the air, while she feeds his rage with her own righteous indignation; and the voices of doom, the voices of residents in their rooms, are being channelled through air ducts to the dangerous, gentle Albie, who waits at the center of it all. And Albie, who is always on the brink of never, has wired the rooming house with dynamite. He sets a timer every time he goes out. He’d better get back in time, without interference or difficulty. Or else…
“This recluse, for all the torment and craziness he seeks to hold at bay, is a man of great sweetness, true generosity. He is known by Callaghan so deeply, with such vast compassion in this profoundly tender piece of work that he ought to go on forever. This may well be Barry Callaghan’s best story and certainly it is one of the most perfectly accomplished and haunting Canadian fictions that I know.” —from the Introduction, by Leon Rooke
2023 • 5.5 x 8.5 inches • PB 140 pages • 978-1-55096-961-0 • $24.95
In experiencing this gorgeously wrought, profoundly tender story, one quickly realizes it is among the most perfectly accomplished and haunting works of Canadian fiction.
Never’s Just the Echo of Forever appeared as a story among stories in the author’s 1995 collection, A Kiss Is Still a Kiss. It later was published as a novella in Italy as Niente é sole l’eco di sempre, and in France as Jamais est l’ècho de toujours. It appears as a novella on its own in English here for the first time. The introduction by the novelist and storyteller Leon Rooke was written for the edition published in Italian.
Barry Callaghan, of Toronto, is the well-known novelist, poet, and person of letters who has been included in every major Canadian anthology, and his fiction and poetry have been translated into seven languages. His works include All the Lonely People and Raise You on the River (2018, Exile Editions), The Black Queen Stories, The Way the Angel Spreads Her Wings, A Kiss Is Still a Kiss, Barrelhouse Kings, Between Trains, Beside Still Waters, among others. He lives in Toronto.
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