Four sisters and their mother explore their fears while teeny ghost people dress up in fragments of their children's clothes. A somewhat-ghost tends the family garden. Deep in the mountains, a shapeshifting mother must sift through her ancestors' gifts and the complexities of love when one boy is born with a beautiful set of fox ears and another is not. In the wake of her elderly mother's tragic death, a daughter tries to make sense of the online dating profile she left behind. And a man named Pooka finds new ways to weave new stories into his abode, in spite of his inherited suffering.

A startling and beguiling story collection, Glorious Frazzled Beings is a love song to the homes we make, keep, and break. (From House of Anansi Press)

Glorious Frazzled Beings was on the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist.

Scotiabank Giller Prie jury citation: "Menopausal gods, procreating droids and boys born as foxes are only a modest few of the glorious frazzled beings that populate Angelique Lalonde's astonishing story collection. Many of the ever-present concerns of the contemporary world — ecology, capital, conservation, gender fluidity, addiction, inequality, indigenous displacement, and the eternal limits of human perspective — find in Lalonde a beguiling literary voice equal to the age, pushing not only at the boundaries of literature but at those of articulation and being. Lalonde gravitates here to the fable and the fairy tale, familiar and estranging in equal measure, to claw at the divide between our world and others — the animal, the alien — while inevitably falling back on, and forgiving, the ever-flawed human being."

Angélique Lalonde is a B.C. writer whose work has been featured in PRISM International, the Journey Prize Anthology, Room and the Malahat Review, among other publications. She received the 2019 Writers' Trust Journey Prize and was nominated for a National Magazine Award. She was awarded an Emerging Writer's residency at the Banff Centre. She lives in Northern B.C. and holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Victoria.

"I wrote these stories mostly for myself. So I can only speak to what they do for me. I am a reader and I know what I hope to take when I read. I'm mostly moved by stories that speak to truth, that help me learn and help me see things in a new way.

"I would hope that readers connect with pieces of their own truth and see themselves in a different light. I hope they give space to the complexities of life and the beauty that lives in the fragile and difficult parts of life."