Seep

Fiction. Dwight Eliot was born on a baseball diamond, during a dugout- clearing brawl between his hometown team, The Seep Selects, and a team of barnstorming Cuban All Stars. Decades later, when he sees his childhood home being moved on a truck down the highway, he begins a quest to research the history of his hometown and of his family. SEEP is being dismantled, and the land is being redeveloped as a master-planned recreational townsite to complement a nearby First Nations casino. And then his brother Darryl arrives on his doorstep with the force of a bus crash. In the face of the town's erasure, he tries to preserve its stories; so doing, he comes to question his own. SEEP limns the tension between land development and landscape, trauma and nostalgia, dysfunction and intimacy in a narrative of twenty-first century Canada.

"Mark Giles assuredly steps in the footsteps of his predecessors who so engagingly limned the Alberta prairie: W.O. Mitchell, Henry Kreisel, W.P. Kinsella, and Robert Kroetsch. Giles' SEEP is a wickedly wonderful account of how our senses of self and of place can be interrelated, with the swirl of emotions involved in each part of the equation making for a complicated world and illuminating fiction."—Tom Wayman