Winner of the Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher and the Browen Wallace Award

Any Given Power is peopled with deftly drawn characters who puzzle through their lives in cities and small towns across Canada. In twelve perfectly formed stories that “open to the universal, like a beautiful dark, rose” (Globe & Mail), York turns her courageous stare to the haunting and bewildering pull of desire, contemporary racism, and poverty, the family, with all its impossible circles and affections, and the multitude of injuries, losses, and moments of grace that define us.

The touchstone of truth in a fictional world is a surprise. When the least expected things seem inevitable and contrived, the reader has shared the most generous of all seductions. Alissa York cares fiercely for the integrity of her characters and never intrudes herself upon them, or us. These are truly original stories, charged with the luminous detail which makes us see life afresh. — Sian Virgo