Ashes: The John Newlove Chapbook Series

by Andrew Lafleche

Bestselling collection of Canadian poetry about survival, love, and loss beginning with the 2016 John Newlove Poetry Award poem, “defeated.” Ashes deals with a different kind of pain and heals a different kind of heartache. Lafleche takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them—because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.

29 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 2, 2018

About the author

Andrew Lafleche writes about people whose worst decisions become the rest of their lives. His fiction follows damaged, morally compromised characters through addiction, violence, grief, and the stories they tell themselves to survive. He is drawn to the moment when people can no longer pretend they are the hero—the moment consequence arrives and every comforting explanation falls apart.

Before becoming a full-time writer, Andrew served as an infantry soldier in the Canadian Armed Forces, including a combat deployment to Afghanistan. He later worked in firefighting, emergency medical response, and undercover anti-human-trafficking operations. These experiences brought him close to people under extraordinary pressure, when rehearsed identities disappear and difficult truths take their place.

They also taught him that human beings are rarely as simple as their worst actions. He does not write to excuse damaged characters or rescue them from consequence. He writes to see them clearly.

Andrew is the author of the novels Ride and Trident Legion and six poetry collections. Although the settings and circumstances change, his work repeatedly returns to damaged masculinity, moral compromise, violent systems, and the consequences that cannot be undone.

He lives in Ottawa, Canada, where he reads, writes, trains Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and disappears down research rabbit holes that may eventually become stories.

Andrew writes for readers who prefer uncomfortable truths to easy answers—and books that continue haunting them after the final page.

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Reviews

[Darrell Epp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Has that urgency, that unmistakable and mysterious something, that hooks you, makes you wonder where the author will take you next....

[Samantha Young · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyed more of the darker corners of the human mind, solid writing, wish it had been longer