Seep (Paperback)

Fiction. Most Anticipated 2015 Fiction Pick, 49th Shelf. Dwight Eliot was born on a baseball diamond, during a dugout- clearing brawl between his hometown team, The Seep Selects, and a team of barnstorming Cuban All Stars. Decades later, when he sees his childhood home being moved on a truck down the highway, he begins a quest to research the history of his hometown and of his family. SEEP is being dismantled, and the land is being redeveloped as a master-planned recreational townsite to complement a nearby First Nations casino. And then his brother Darryl arrives on his doorstep with the force of a bus crash. In the face of the town's erasure, he tries to preserve its stories; so doing, he comes to question his own. SEEP limns the tension between land development and landscape, trauma and nostalgia, dysfunction and intimacy in a narrative of twenty-first century Canada.

"Mark Giles assuredly steps in the footsteps of his predecessors who so engagingly limned the Alberta prairie: W.O. Mitchell, Henry Kreisel, W.P. Kinsella, and Robert Kroetsch. Giles' SEEP is a wickedly wonderful account of how our senses of self and of place can be interrelated, with the swirl of emotions involved in each part of the equation making for a complicated world and illuminating fiction."—Tom Wayman

Praise for Mark's previous title, Knucklehead & Other Stories:

"Elegant riddles dressed in workaday clothes, puzzles of image and event whose solutions cut to the heart of being human in a world of perils... There's not a word or image that fails to contribute to Giles purpose."—The Globe & Mail

"Giles' style is polished and assured throughout... Knucklehead is a solid debut."—Quill & Quire

After many years mired in the middle-management muddle of transnational corporations, he now is a writer and an educator. His first book Knucklehead (Anvil Press) was honoured with the W.O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Award. His writing (fiction, poetry, and non-fiction) has appeared in magazines in both Canada and the U.S.A. Saskatchewan- born, Edmonton-raised, with stops in Victoria, Kelowna, Montreal, and Halifax, W. Mark Giles now calls Calgary home.