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Skin

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Now, for the first time, a blistering book of short fiction from one of Canada’s most loved novelists.

In Skin, Catherine Bush plunges into the vortex of all that shapes us. Summoning relationships between the human and more-than-human, she explores a world where touch and intimacy are both desirable and fraught.

Ranging from the realistic to the speculative, Bush’s stories tackle the condition of our restless, unruly world amidst the tumult of viruses, climate change, and ecological crises. Here, she brings to life unusual and perplexing a man falls in love with the wind; a substitute teacher’s behaviour with a student brings unforeseen risks; a woman becomes fixated on offering foot washes to strangers.

Bold, vital, and unmistakably of the moment, Skin gives a charged and animating voice to the question of how we face the world and how, in the process, we discover tenderness and allow ourselves to be transformed.

224 pages, Paperback

Published April 22, 2025

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About the author

Catherine Bush

19 books47 followers
Catherine Bush loves islands and northern landscapes. She is the author of five novels, including Blaze Island, the Canada Reads long-listed Accusation (2013), the Trillium Award short-listed Claire’s Head (2004), and the national bestselling The Rules of Engagement (2000), also a New York Times Notable Book and a Globe & Mail Best Book of the Year. She lives in Toronto and an old schoolhouse in Eastern Ontario and has spoken internationally about addressing the climate crisis in fiction. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Guelph and Coordinator of the Guelph Creative Writing MFA, based in Toronto. Her nonfiction has appeared in publications including the Globe and Mail, The New York Times Magazine, the literary magazine Brick, Canadian Notes and Queries and the anthology, The Heart Does Break (2009).

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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
Profile Image for Courtney.
491 reviews36 followers
April 8, 2025
A unique collection of stories. I enjoyed this a lot.

Thank you Goose Lane for the complimentary copy.
Profile Image for Sara Hailstone.
Author 1 book13 followers
August 31, 2025
Sometimes, it is not how we navigate the world from the outside that matters, the skin we carry or how we perceive the world through it, what we have to do is extend beyond it. This idea is the core meaning of what I took away from Catherine Bush’s collection of 13 stories in “Skin.”

Relationships that forge us, that push us beyond our pre-set limitations and boundaries, the stories in “Skin” show us where we need to extend to, how we need to evolve past our predisposed physical entombment. At the end of the day, intimacy, desire, and our fraught existences seek connection. We fear abandonment too.

Bush’s writing style is thread through from the realistic to the speculative, exposing and lifting us from our places in a world tortured by personal and global issues. Betrayal and propriety, to virus and climate change, ecological crises are juxtaposed with the domestic and public space.

Published on April 22, 2025 by Goose Lane Editions, “Skin” makes for a captivating and puzzling reading experience fluctuating between flash fiction and longer pieces. Goose Lane Editions, based in Fredericton, New Brunswick, showcases fiction, poetry, art, and works on pressing social and political issues while championing Queer, First Nations, and Inuit voices.

Catherine Bush is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. She lives in Toronto and in Eastern Ontario. She has published five novels and has earned respectable accolades for this writing. Her most recent novel, “Blaze Island,” was a Globe and Mail and Writers’ Trust of Canada Best Book of the Year and achieved the Hamilton Reads 2021 Selection. She has earned the Canada Reads longlisted Accusation, the Trillium Award shortlist, and was named a New York Times Notable Book and a L.A. Times Best Book of the Year. She has also been shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Award. Her novels include, “Skin” (2025), “Blaze Island” (2020), and “The Rules of Engagement” (2000). Bush was the 2024 Writer-in-Residence at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society. She can be found at: www.catherinebush.com.

I was pulled into the collection from the first story that is shy from being a novella in length. Titled, “Benevolence: An East Village Story,” the story follows the co-habitation and relationship of a supply teacher from the 1980s who takes in a student in need of stability and a caring adult in their lives. I anticipated the eventual fall-from-grace of Ellen, a 30-year-old teacher who shows constant control of desire for Chris, an 18-year-old student, but Bush perseveres with a narrative of benevolence and integrity. This story was crafted effortlessly and there were times I forgot I was even reading as the unfolding and tightening up of events felt more as if I was watching a T.V. show. In an interview with 49th Shelf, Bush gives context to the writing process for “Benevolence: An East Village Story,” that the story was originally written in the late 1980s and Bush let it sit for forty years. Bush explains, “to re-enter the story forty years later I had, first of all, to construct a retrospective narrative, someone my age looking back on their twenties, on the cusp of turning thirty, and the tumult of that turning point.” I further did not pick up on the parallel between Bush’s story and that of Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Bush gives context, “I was also thinking about Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, and the weird relationship between the lawyer and Bartleby, who moves into, then refuses to leave the lawyer’s office.” Above all, I enjoyed the seamless immersion into the setting of New York City in the 1980s for this story and it stays with me as an impression from the collection.

In finishing this story, it was almost jarring to switch to flows of flash fiction throughout the collection with one other longer piece. I wondered over the decision for the layout of the collection and if there would be cohesion, or an underlying theme or symbol that would subtly be braided through the stories. I understood the direction of the flash fiction in this collection from Bush’s interview in giving context to the pandemic and the style of writing that grew out of the lifestyle of lockdown. “Before the pandemic I found myself turning to flash fiction, the most compressed form, the opposite of a novel. I was drawn to this completely different formal challenge. Ideas came to me this way. I pursued them. I relished the shortness of stories, their leaps, swerves, compressed breath, a different way of moving through time.” There was purpose in positioning longer stories amongst the flash fiction. “I’ve loved being able to expand my formal range with the collection: to write flash, stories, and novellas, then bring them together into an ensemble that, I hope, takes the reader on a journey.” I did go on a journey, and the overarching push was to extend beyond my skin.

Another story that stood out to me was titled, “Glacial.” This story pushed me beyond traditional and colonial concepts of nature in literature which deepened the richness of the collection. In “Glacial,” a woman develops a relationship with a glacier above the Arctic Circle during an arts residency. “How does one address a glacier, so ancient, such a miracle of compressed time, time turned to ice?” In speaking to the glacier, she receives a response. “Take off your skin, the voice says, the voice that may or may not belong to the glacier.” In a chilling turn of events, the woman becomes trapped and abandoned at the end of the story, in order to evolve or push to the next level of existence, the reader understands that death is impending. Pushed out of her physical body entrapped, she does learn how to take off her skin and let her soul pool into the earth.

“There is no other way to move. She is moving, finding the depths of the rocks, the texture of water, the shifting border where water meets ice, salt water meets fresh, grief meets tenderness. She is taking off her skin, and it may be that, soon, there will be nothing left of her, but she is doing it, becoming skinless, expansive, she has no choice but to continue, no other way onward than to abandon all that was for all that is.”

To become skinless, to feel that out in whatever contour of our lives that entraps us, that is the key.

Thank you to Catherine Bush, Goose Lane Editions and River Street Writing for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!

https://www.sarahailstone.com/book-re...
Profile Image for Kinga U.
31 reviews
August 7, 2025
fantastic stories that take me back to Ontario and Toronto! Its funny and smart and charming
Profile Image for J.J. Dupuis.
Author 22 books39 followers
April 22, 2025
After thirty years of novels that have shaped the CanLit landscape, including her celebrated debut Minus Time, and her most recent, the critically-acclaimed Blaze Island, Catherine Bush has released her first short story collection. Skin collects thirteen stories written over the course of Bush’s esteemed career, some exploring themes familiar to readers of Bush’s novels, and most of which analyse intimacy, contact and the distance between people. Despite several commonalities, these stories vary greatly in subject and form, and display the breadth of Bush’s talent.

The collection opens with “Benevolence: An East Village Story,” which tells of a substitute teacher, Ellen Larsen, who takes Chris, a troubled student, into the apartment she shares with her absentee husband. Essentially a novella, the story takes us through the life of a Canadian artists, actress and teacher, living in New York City, the AIDS crisis looming large in the arts scene backdrop. She takes a position as a substitute teacher, and meets a promising student with a precarious housing situation. Fearing that the young man might not graduate without a stable home life, she takes him in. Chris displays what Humbert Humbert might consider nymphet qualities, as it appears that men and women of various ages seem to desire him, creating tension between him and Ellen on more than just obvious levels. Ellen struggles to balance her benevolence, that tension, the appearance of propriety, care for this young man and her own understated desires. Bush steers readers through that torrent with a steady hand, allowing us to feel the magnetic forces between Ellen and Chris, both the attraction and the repulsion.

The propriety, or impropriety, of human contact recurs in many forms throughout the collection. The title story, told from the point-of-view of a daughter, tells of a mother who ministers to strangers by washing their feet. It’s not a cultural tradition, or really a trademark of one particular denomination, but an act she takes upon herself to feel human contact and impart that same feeling on others. “Touch,” a story that takes place at the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, explores contact and intimacy while the clock ticked towards a lockdown. It’s a well-wrought and interesting story in its own right, but works well in a collection where the AIDS crisis of the eighties has already been explored.

For longtime fans of Bush’s work, certain stories stand out as thematic siblings to her novels. When her novel Claire’s Head was released in 2004, it was lauded by Dr. Shane Neilson in the Canadian Medical Association Journal for its portrayal of migraines and those who suffer from them. With the story “The International Headache Conference,” Bush revisits that realm of one of the more misunderstood ailments. With the deftness that she has shown from her earliest work, Bush shows us the connection between those who suffer, those who understand, and the distance between those who don’t, especially when the most intimate partners cannot grasp there lover’s pain.

Those of us who became fans of Bush’s writing with her most recent novel, the masterwork Blaze Island, will find a lot to appreciate about the stories “Derecho” and “Glacial.” Just like the novel, they takes us to far-flung islands and the frozen north, leaving us at the mercy of the elements. Her detailed descriptions scientific research, which had served Bush well in books like Minus Time and Blaze Island, add richness into these pieces of what some might call “climate fiction.” It is remarkable how, through precise language, she is able to breathe warmth into the coldest, most remote regions in our hemisphere, and infuse scientific disciplines with the same wonder and sense of adventure that Hemingway brought to fishing and hunting.

The stories in Skin range from epistolary to experimental, some set in the past, some in the present, providing a showcase for Bush’s talents. There is a tenderness in these stories, not drenched in sentimentality, but constructed on a real, human foundation. Skin is at once fresh and vibrant while being a culmination of decades of practice and craft. It stands as a fine primer for Catherine Bush’s writing and an exciting debut story collection by one of Canada’s master novelists.

This review was first published in The Miramichi Reader
Profile Image for Alison Gadsby.
Author 1 book10 followers
September 30, 2025
The longest of the stories in Catherine Bush’s collection, SKIN, opens with a piece of paper found in the pages of Barthes, containing the handwriting of a former beloved, a once promising person who suddenly vanishes from the narrator’s life. I felt, in reading BENEVOLENCE: A Lower East Side Story, that I am not the only one to wonder, dreamingly, about the people who get away from us. The friends and acquaintances who once existed in the stormy moments of our lives but get washed away somehow, the people we still feel in our skin. When their memory resurfaces, we’re sent on social media searches and to the depths of page 12 in an Internet search query. It’s jarring, and this is my favourite of the collection (I think!).

The title story, SKIN, is a flash of life as told by the adult child of a woman who leaves a Christian Evangelical church to dedicate herself to attending to people’s feet. It reminds us of the power of human connection. And then we experience the emotional loss—found abandoned in the cargo hull of a plane—of a beloved dog. A woman who suffers headaches ends up in a hotel room with a stranger. The night before lockdown, a narrator loses their keys in a movie theatre. A bisexual screenwriter, hiding his sexual identity, and struggling to be loved, winds up in a Honeymoon suite with a man who might change everything (also a favourite). A letter from Roxanne that offers an alternative to the fabled story of Cyrano de Bergerac (Oh, no, is this my favourite?). A woman runs over an angel. A polar bear researcher lives in the stormy aftermath of an assault. A woman communes with a glacier. These stories!

A collection of unimaginable losses concentrated in a collection of thirteen powerful and expressive stories, that in some cases are mere moments in the lives of incredibly memorable characters. SKIN reminds us that we are not all that we’ve lost in life, the breakages, the wounds, the scars, but in the “persistent presence of the past” we are reminded, despite everything, to live and to love, and to appreciate the beauty of life, the awful beauty in our “slow decay.”

I haven't read a book by Goose Lane that I didn't like, so this incredible collection doesn't surprise me.
Profile Image for Abby.
275 reviews8 followers
May 5, 2025
Thank you to River Street Wing and Catherine Bush for the gifted copy

The collection of short stories in this book will definitely hit you right in head, body, and soul. It'll leave you thinking about each of the story presented in this book. You have a story with intimacies, fixations, and behaviors. Everyone is different, but I feel like anyone who reads it will find a story that they will be able to relate to. I will just say that this anthology will leave you with food for thought in your connections and relationships with yourself and with other people. I ended up looking for other books to read right after this one that was closely related to this topic right after. I feel like this book takes a look at different perspectives on intimacy, relationships, and human behaviors on a different scale than what we are used to hearing or noticing. It's about the mark we leave behind, with other people, and what that means. I feel that this isn't just on a literary scale, but on a psychological scale as well. It's got that Freud vs. Adler perspective to it.
Profile Image for Not Sarah Connor  Writes.
587 reviews40 followers
June 28, 2025
Thank you to River Street Writing for sending me this book in exchange for an honest review!

I don't think Bush's writing is for me. While I can appreciate these stories for what they are in hindsight, I really struggled to care for them while I was reading the book.

Read the full review on my blog!

Also, I am more active on Storygraph now so if you want to see what I'm read right away, follow me there!
Profile Image for Jane.
341 reviews
August 4, 2025
On the cover is this quote from Tessa McWatt: ‘Subtle, stinging and beautifully observed’

I agree with the quote. My only problem with some of the stories is that they end abruptly leaving me questioning the message of the story itself.
Profile Image for Karen Lowe.
552 reviews4 followers
January 18, 2026
Interesting and intriguing stories. I especially liked the last 2: Glacial, and In the Park the Great Horned Owl Summons His Mate. The stories have a quiet power in them. A woman finding herself, her strength, her life.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews