Beyond This Point

From award-winning story writer Holley Rubinsky comes a dazzling debut novel that explores, with cleverness and wry wit, the hopes and despair that can surface when we are faced with unavoidable change.

Over the course of one hot summer in the Judith Lake Valley, in the rugged interior of British Columbia, five women find their lives turned upside down by events they could not foresee, or refused to see coming. The long-time lover of a charismatic healer discovers that, this time, an affair will have lasting consequences. A woman on the verge of divorce and fearing the worst about her health tries to go home again and learns she has to go further. A girl who has depended on the sale of her body to get by returns to the valley sick and exhausted, bringing the child no one wants to remember. Just as her husband suffers a sudden stroke, a mother finds that her rebellious teenage daughter has done what she feared most. And when a grieving young widow from the East arrives to stay on the property of old friends, her visit brings surprising upheaval.

As these lives become entwined, a vivid portrayal of a community emerges. Behind it all is the wildness of the land, the threat of approaching forest fire, and a boy’s simmering desire for vengeance, which erupts in a harrowing act.

Intense, riveting, compassionate, Beyond This Point is filled with events and characters we will not soon forget. In this novel, Holley Rubinsky has created her boldest, most captivating work of fiction.

Holley Rubinsky is the acclaimed author of At First I Hope for Rescue and Rapid Transits and Other Stories. She has won the Journey Prize and the Canadian National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Fiction. Holley Rubinsky divides her time between British Columbia and Arizona.