I’m excited to announce that my new novel Once Removed (2020, Turnstone Press) is set for release this September and is available to pre-order now! Ask for it at your local independent bookseller!
An affectionate pastiche of small-town Mennonite life, replete with duty, folly, irreverence, and joy.
—David Bergen
Hilarious as Schitt’s Creek, sinister as Hitchcock, Once Removed gives us Timothy Heppner, the quintessential non-resistant Mennonite, in a comic tour de force that exposes the friction between progress and preservation, ethnic pride and ethnic embarrassment, commerce and heritage, truth and boosterism, and the coercion and acquiescence that is as real to the big city as to a small town.
-Armin Wiebe, Grandmother Laughing
Timothy Heppner is a frustrated ghostwriter struggling to make ends meet in Edenfeld, a small Mennonite community bulldozing its way towards modernity. A member of the Preservation Society but desperate to keep his job with the mayor’s Parks and “Wreck” department, Timothy finds himself in an awkward position when he is hired to write an updated version of the town’s history book. Fuelled by two warring loyalties, the threat of personal bankruptcy, and a good deal of fried bologna, Timothy must find his own voice to tell the one story that could make—or break—him.
Honest and laugh-out-loud funny, Once Removed explores the real cost of progress in this new Canadian classic.
You can also download a PDF sample of the first two chapters here: Once Removed Sampler.