Tunnel Island

Set on an island in BC's Salish Sea, a richly imagined and often hilarious collection of linked stories by Bill Gaston, a master of the art of short fiction.

Eleven stories feature a cast of characters striving to overcome pasts that often include a catastrophic error. On Tunnel Island, moral misjudgments, semi-legal schemes, and antisocial gaffes abound as characters seek a remedy for what ails them: loneliness, heartbreak, grief.

Jack ekes out a living doing odd jobs and minding the estates of absent owners, until he takes a lover's bad advice and rents their houses through Airbnb. A dying woman retains her wry Wiccan sense of humour while lovingly ministered to by her partner — in between his trips to hand out Halloween candy at their door. The almost mystical disappearance of a toddler is revisited years later when her parents remarry in a surreal outdoor ceremony.

Highly original and empathetic, Tunnel Island is electrified by dark undercurrents that jolt and illuminate by turns. Bill Gaston's bighearted vision of life on a heavily forested island immerses readers in a world rendered tender and tolerable by human folly and our stumbling attempts at redemption.