Kelly Cooper – författare

A remarkable debut collection, Kelly Cooper's Eyehill provides a multi-hued portrait of a small prairie town. Too small to support a high school or a drugstore, Eyehill is populated by men and women who have worked for generations to wrest a living from the dry, rolling hills. Like people anywhere else, they hunger for love, understanding, a decent living, and safety and comfort in their homes. Their passion for something more, something better, is tangled by their almost visceral attachment to the land and by the dangerous allure of an oil industry that grows more rapacious every year.In this startling debut collection of loosely linked stories, characters disappear only to resurface once again a few stories later. Among the central characters are Rhea, a girl whose mother abandoned her and her father when she was three and who grows to adulthood full of questions and contradictions; Jarvis, a boy whom Rhea loves but wants as a boyfriend only when he has to marry his pregnant girlfriend; and the Lalonde brothers, so different and yet so clearly formed by their shared circumstances.A strange eroticism pervades "They Secretly Pray for Rain." A subtle, mostly denied violence underlies "Very Little Blood," but it percolates to the surface in the terrible climax of "River Judith." The ancient aquifer flowing below the prairie pulses through the very marrow of the men's bones. Farming is not what they do, but what they are, and interference is fatal. In this small, tightly knit community, secrets are essential. The need to keep silent and to control terrifying emotions is at the same time necessary and ruinous, and the stories people tell hide as much as they reveal.

The first in the Dominion of Domino series, History of a Queen is the tale of danger, courage, and finding hope when all seems lost. Our courageous queen, Domino's mother, ventures too far from the safety of her kingdom and finds herself in a strange new world. Without the protection of her royal guards, the queen must learn how to hunt for food and maneuver through the wild things of this strange new land. More importantly, she must be cunning, for her very survival depends upon her ability to outsmart the evil ogre possum whose sole purpose is to kill our beloved queen and destroy all things loved by the Caretakers. Will our queen find her way? Will joy ever again fill her heart? Come see and lose yourself to the adventure in The Dominion of Domino.