Steeped in lore and landscape, peppered with journal entries, newspaper clippings and advertisements, this marvellous 'literary scrapbook' captures the harsh realities of the seacoast community of Scots Bay, Nova Scotia during WWI. McKay is possessed with a brilliant narrative gift.' -Christy Ann Conlin, author of Heave 'Reading Ami McKay's first novel is like rummaging through a sea-chest found in a Nova Scotian attic. With a startling sense of time and place The Birth House travels through a landscape that is at once deeply tender and exquisitely harsh. The novel offers a world of mystery and wisdom, a world where tradition collides with science, where life and death meet under the moon. And we the readers get to witness the emergence of a powerful new voice in Canadian writing.' -Marjorie Anderson, co-editor of Dropped Threads I and II 'Ami McKay is a marvellous storyteller who writes with a haunting and evocative voice.

In McKay's depiction of Dora Rare, an early twentieth century midwife, attention is paid to the day-to-day moments of love and tending that enable humans to endure. She retrieves our social history and lays it out before us in a collage of vivid, compelling detail.

'Fresh as a loaf of homemade bread just out of the oven, The Birth House, a tale of sex, birth, love and pain will more than satisfy the hungry reader.' -Joan Clark, author of An Audience of Chairs 'The moon over Nova Scotia must have extra magic in it to have fostered a writer of Ami McKay's lyrical sway and grace.

The Birth House by Ami McKay