Bow Grip: A Novel

• Ivan E. Coyote
• Arsenal Pulp Press, 2006
• Paperback, 221 pages
• ISBN: 9781551522135

Winner of the ReLit Award for Best Novel

Shortlisted for the Ferro-Grumley Award for Women's Fiction
An American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book

Ivan E. Coyote is acclaimed as one of North America's most beguiling storytellers; Ivan's honest, down-to-earth tales, many of which are based on personal experience, are compelling for their simple human truths. Her 2005 story collection, Loose End, was also shortlisted for the prestigious Ferro-Grumley Award for Women's Fiction.

Bow Grip, Ivan's long-awaited first novel, is a breathtaking story about love and loneliness, and the long road one must travel between them. Joey is a good-hearted, fortysomething mechanic from small-town Alberta whose wife has recently left him for another woman. When a stranger named James approaches his shop and agrees to purchase a beat-up blue Volvo in exchange for a beautiful, hand-crafted cello, Joey sees it as an opportunity to finally make some overdue changes in his life.

But some troubling suspicions about James, and a desire to close the door on his failed marriage, compels Joey to hit the road and travel to Calgary, the big city by the Bow River. He stations himself at a rundown motel, where he struggles to learn how to play the cello, and strangers with their own complicated pasts―an older gay man, a single mother―become confidants. With quiet authority, <i>Bow Grip</i> is about one man's real rite of passage―trying to keep the ghosts of personal history at bay with a heart that's as big as the endless prairie sky.

Ivan E. Coyote is a writer and performer. She is the author of five books published by Arsenal Pulp Press: the four story collections Close to Spider Man, (shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Short Fiction Prize), One Man's Trash, and Loose End (shortlisted for the Ferro-Grumley Women's Fiction Award), and her latest, The Slow Fix, as well as the novel Bow Grip (also shortlisted for the Ferro-Grumley Women's Fiction Award and named a Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library Association). Ivan was also a founding member of the performance collective Taste This. She is a long-time columnist for Xtra! in Toronto and Xtra! West in Vancouver. Originally from the Yukon, Ivan recently relocated to Vancouver from Ottawa.