Awards

• Long-listed for Carol Shields Prize for Fiction 2025

Overview

In the summer of 2020, with a heat wave bearing down and a brood of periodical cicadas climbing into the trees, Husha mourns the recent death of her mother while quarantining with her ailing grandfather, Arthur, at his lakeside cabin in remote Ontario. They're soon joined by Husha's ex-lover, Nellie, who arrives without explanation to complete their trio. Also among them is a strange book, discovered by Husha while cleaning out her mother's house. When she, Arthur, and Nellie begin to read it together, they learn that her mother's last missive was a short story collection, crawling with unsettling imagery and terrifying transformations. As the stories bleed into their cloistered life in the cabin, they must each reckon with loss, longing, and what it means to truly know another person. Incantatory and atmospheric, Cicada Summer is a dazzlingly original novel about how we grieve and care for one another.

Full Product Details

9781324073819

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Reviews

"""Mesmerizingly subtle and elegant, Cicada Summer investigates which stories must be told in order to unravel that which is unfathomable. As the cicadas chirp, their husks dropping from trees, Erica McKeen masterfully takes us into the liminal space of grief, into a world that crisps alive while it vanishes."" -- Gerardo Sámano Córdova, author of Monstrilio"

Author Information

Erica McKeen is the author of Tear, a novel that won the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for literary fiction, and Cicada Summer. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, where she works as a teacher and librarian.

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