Synopsis

The Glorious Mysteries: And Other Stories reveals a world rich in iconography and landscapes—Mexican and North American, urban and rural. These stories explore spiritual themes of meaning, loss, and suffering. Most are coming-of-age stories—some set in the 1960s, some in the 1980s and 1990s. The characters, which include a small child on an Alberta farm, a young middle-class woman living in California, and a nurse struggling with her faith, have the reader leaning in to hear a voice that is intimate and honest.

Reviews

“In these well-crafted stories, Audrey Whitson digs deeply into the mysteries of life. Her characters—a gay man drawn to degradation, a child disturbed by intimations of violence, a young woman working for Latin American refugees—turn away from security and easy faith to search for purpose, wholeness, and a true vision. The stories range in time and place from an Alberta farm in the mid-sixties to a barrio in Oakland and a poor village in Mexico in the eighties to the bathhouses and cruising sites of Edmonton. Each place is vividly captured, grounded in the earth, from black loam to red dust, but it is in illuminating the land within that Whitson excels. The Glorious Mysteries and Other Stories is moving, thought-provoking, satisfying: glorious indeed.”

—  Caterina Edwards Loverso

“Engrossing and searching. These stories deal with the mysteries at the heart of childhood, family and life. Audrey Whitson is a writer to watch.”

— Mary Borsky