Inside
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: March 16, 2017 12:34 PM | Last Updated: April 26, 2017
Alix Ohlin
When Grace, an exceedingly competent and devoted therapist in Montreal, stumbles across a man who has just failed to hang himself, her instinct to help kicks in immediately. Before long, however, she realizes that her feelings for this charismatic, extremely guarded stranger are far from straightforward. In the meantime, her troubled teenage patient, Annie, runs away from home and soon will reinvent herself in New York as an aspiring and ruthless actress, as unencumbered as humanly possible by any personal attachments.
And Mitch, Grace's ex-husband, who is a therapist as well, leaves the woman he's desperately in love with to attend to a struggling native community in the bleak Arctic. We follow these four compelling, complex characters from Montreal and New York to Hollywood and Rwanda, each of them with a consciousness that is utterly distinct and urgently convincing.
With razor-sharp emotional intelligence, Inside poignantly explores the many dangers as well as the imperative of making ourselves available to — and responsible for — those dearest to us. (From Penguin Random House Canada)
From the book
Maybe it was just because she wanted to know what happened. Regardless, she was sitting in the waiting room hours later, shivering each time the glass doors slid open with an icy draft. The linoleum was streaked with gray-brown slush people had tracked in, and she could smell car exhaust and cigarette smoke from the sidewalk outside. There was no sign of any police officer wanting to ask her questions. The man had been wheeled off, with a canopy of nurses over his still-silent body. Grace waited, though she wasn't sure for what or whom. When she remembered the skis — probably long gone by now — she smacked herself on the forehead. Hers were practically brand-new. She looked at her watch; it was seven o'clock, completely dark on the mountain. She was tired and hungry and ready to go home. Before she did, though, she wanted to know that he was being taken care of. She walked over to a nurse at the reception area.
From Inside by Alix Ohlin ©2013. Published by Penguin Random House Canada.