Storm Warnings: stories of love and sorrow - Paperback

by Tom Henighan (Author)

Love and loneliness, the quest for family happiness and sexual fulfillment, odd encounters and comical miscalculations-these stories move between city and country and display a wide range of men, women and children in search of joy, pleasure, and a success in life that often seems just out of reach. Less People in love (Blue Menus, Prime Time), cheating spouses (Storm Warnings, Intruders, Blue Menus), people near the breaking point ( Intruders, Famine, Blue Menus, Visiting Mother), women looking for peace of mind, or God, or finding miracles in daily life (Visiting Mother, Confirmation, The Well), baffled country folk (Famine, The House, The Acrobats), kids caught up in comic or sad predicaments (Enemies of Culture, The Acrobats), people close to violence, or over the edge (At Approximately Three PM, Hotel Paradise, Famine) . . . These dramatic stories catch moments of real life in familiar settings of city or country. The writer reaches out with sympathy and insight, depicting men, women, and children, both simple and complex, who, like all of us, are searching for happiness in a daunting world. As one reviewer noted: "Tom Henighan . . . seems to take his inspiration from all points of the imaginative compass. Henighan's use of the short story form . . . shows great versatility [and] the thematic concerns of these stories are also wide-ranging." The author has published some twenty books in print form, including short fiction, with publishers in the U.S., Canada, and Britain.

Author Biography

Tom Henighan, Ottawa writer and editor, is the author of some 20 published books, including fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. Some of his best-known non-fiction titles include two important books on Canadian culture, Ideas of North (1997), and The Presumption of Culture (1996), as well as Coming of Age in Arabia (2004), about the former British Colony of Aden, and a biography of the explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson (2009). He has also published two adult novels (one of them Nightshade, a mystery novel, in 2010), two volumes of short stories, and six YA novels, including Mercury Man (2004), Doom Lake Holiday (2009), and The Boy from Left Field (2012). Tom was one of the (three) founders of ARC poetry magazine, and has published three volumes of poetry, including The Fire Lessons (2016). His work has been nominated for various awards, including The Seal Books first novel award, the Red Maple Award, the Ottawa Fiction Prize, Shamus Award and the Riesling Award. Henighan was awarded the Victor Tolgesy Prize for lifetime contributions to the arts in Ottawa.