Gambler's Fallacy follows on the success of Judith Cowan's 1997 story collection, More Than Life Itself, which was shortlisted for the Québec Writers' Federation First Book Award. The seven stories in Gambler's Fallacy extend her range and power.

Judith Cowan lives in Trois-Rivières and these stories are set there - offering us a view of Québec both strange and intimate, visionary and comic, an insider's view. The society she describes she catches in loving detail. Crammed with verbal felicities, electric with incident, this collection will delight those who enjoyed her first book and will enchant those who are encountering her work for the first time.

`The conundrum at the core of Gambler's Fallacy, author and translator Judith Cowan's seven-story follow-up to her distinguished 1997 debut, More Than Life Itself, involves an impressively erratic cast of fearful and fragile Québécois characters, capriciously transformed into victims of the strange vagaries of chance and serendipitous circumstance. Not unlike Raymond Carver or Alice Munro, Cowan creates heartbreakingly felicitous portraits of Chekhovian elegance, featuring the ordinarily forgotten little folks who, for no apparent reason or logical explanation, have fallen through the cracks. ... Suffused with a largeness of spirit everywhere animated by moments of aching clarity and lyrical grace, Cowan's gritty minimalist vignettes will, if truth be told, simply break the most hardened of readers' hearts. You can bet the farm on it.' - Judith Fitzgerald, Globe and Mail

`Cowan's fiction expresses an abiding sympathy for individual humans in their elemental loneliness and isolation, for people struggling on with hope in the face of defeat.' - Doug Rollins, Montreal Review of Books

`A writer and translator living in Trois-Rivières, Judith Cowan brings a rare sensibility to the stories in Gambler's Fallacy. Writing with an intimate's grasp of life in a second-string - if not second-rate - town, she strikes an elegaic chord that grows as she gets under the skin of the seasons and moods she surveys.' - Nancy Wigston, Toronto Star

`Cowan holds a candle to all those anonymous roadside and riverside places we pass by quickly on our way to somewhere else. Hung together, these stories are like lanterns on a dark horizon.' - The Montreal Gazette

`Opening with the ruminations of a poet's girlfriend, left to fend for herself at his book launch, Cowan moves deftly through an array of personalities: a schizophrenic, an abandoned husband, an unwitting inheritor, a traumatized student, a foreign poet and an unemployed recluse who finds adventure rather than his desired drink at the local pub. Cowan treats each of these individuals as though they were her own kin, loving them, letting them grow and flourish within the lives she grants them on the pages of her collection.