sewn paper
Fiction/Literary
May 1999
160 pages
ISBN 0-88984-205-1
$16.95

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Devil's Darning Needle

Linda Holeman's characters are instantly familiar. Or are they? In the nine stories which comprise Devil's Darning Needle, we meet people -- seemingly ordinary -- struggling to go forward. The reader is taken from early memories of sex and death through the rise and fall of hope and despair, betrayal and redemption.

Meet Willow, who holds a mysterious and suffocating spell over a woman who innocently befriends her; the powerful Birdie, who, despite her lowly position, becomes a saviour; Seamus, carrying all his anguish and faith in a simple cookie tin. These are but a few of Holeman's memorable characters, all guarding the secrets of their hearts. With their finely tuned moments of memory and truth, their pivotal flashes of clarity, these characters will continue to haunt the reader long after the book has been set down.

`Linda Holeman's stories deserve to be in everyone's library. They are gems, full of subtle feeling that shifts from one mood to another as easily and as quietly as water takes its shape in fields and rocky places.'
    - The Bookseller

`the nine subtly told stories in this collection are filled with memorable characters guarding the secrets of their hearts. Finely tuned moments of memory and truth and pivotal flashes of clarity reveal characters struggling with fear and the anguish of pasts that will not go away. An emotional landscape filled with haunted characters who linger long after the book has been read.'
    - Books of the Season for Prairie Readers

`Devil's Darning Needle should prove a turning point for Linda Holeman. While the Winnipeg writer has earned a fine national reputation for her young adult fiction, this new collection of nine short stories, her second for adults, is certain to garner her praise and admiration from every writer across the country.

`Each one of this collection's poignant, finely crafted stories, which in character and setting are often reminiscent of the works of Alice Munro, introduces ordinary people confronting their personal, but not uncommon demons.'
    - Winnipeg Free Press

Praise for Holeman's previous short story collection:

`Flying to Yellow is a gem: the stories are distinct, sparkling, and illuminating. The difficulties and challenges the characters face are not particularly strange or rare...but these stories are nevertheless profound in many ways.'
    - Winnipeg Free Press

`Though the book consists of stories that are firmly rooted in the quotidian, it ends in the miraculous...Flying to Yellow has a hard-won and undeniable power.'
    - Quill and Quire

Linda's young adult novel Promise Song has had roaring success in 1998: selected for the 1998 Books for the Teen Age by the New York Public Library, finalist for the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People, short-listed by the McNally-Robinson Book of the Year Award, short-listed for the Ontario Library Association Red Maple Award, Choice of the Canadian Childrens Book Centre. Her first collection of stories for adults, Flying To Yellow, came out with Turnstone Press in 1996; one of the stories, "Turning the Worm," was selected for the Journey Prize Anthology. 

She has travelled widely , and her past careers include a huge range -- from dairy worker to a decade of teaching. She lives in Winnipeg with her husband and three children, and teaches creative writing to both adults and students.