Alayna Fender defended Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles on Canada Reads 2020.

February in Newfoundland is the longest month of the year.

Another blizzard is threatening to tear a strip off downtown St. John's, while inside The Hazel restaurant a storm system of sex, betrayal, addiction and hurt is breaking overhead. Iris, a young hostess from around the bay, is forced to pull a double despite resolving to avoid the charming chef and his wealthy restaurateur wife. Just tables over, Damian, a hungover and self-loathing server, is trying to navigate a potential punch-up with a pair of lit customers who remain oblivious to the rising temperature in the dining room. Meanwhile Olive, a young woman far from her northern home, watches it all unfurl from the fast and frozen street. Through rolling blackouts, we glimpse the truth behind the shroud of scathing lies and unrelenting abuse, and discover that resilience proves most enduring in the dead of this winter's tale.

By turns biting, funny, poetic and heartbreaking, Megan Gail Coles's debut novel rips into the inner lives of a wicked cast of characters, building towards a climax that will shred perceptions and force a reckoning. This is blistering Newfoundland Gothic for the twenty-first century, a wholly original, bracing, and timely portrait of a place in the throes of enormous change, where two women confront the traumas of their past in an attempt to overcome the present and to pick up a future. (From House of Anansi Press)

Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club was on the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist.

Alayna Fender is a cat-loving, Canadian, LGBTQ YouTube content creator who brings her frank and funny perspective to a wide range of topics, with wellness and sexuality being her specialties. When she's not creating online content, she is teaching mindfulness, compassion and inclusion at workshops, conventions and schools across North America.

Megan Gail Coles is a playwright from St. John's. She previously published the short story collection Eating Habits of the Chronically Lonesome, which won the BMO Winterset Award, the ReLit Award and the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award. It also earned her the one-time Writers' Trust 5x5 prize.

"My book is very much about power imbalance. It is about people who have power and people who do not, and why. The novel is set in a restaurant called the Hazel in downtown St. John's on Duckworth Street. It takes place over the course of one day in February. I set a hard story in the hardest part of the year.

"I know there will be people who are uncomfortable with the tone of the novel because it is so full on. It is unrelenting at times by design. There have been times when I have tried to approach this same discussion and I have been ignored. It seemed to me that the only way to get people to wake up was to actually stage the book inside of a living nightmare. But I urge everyone to be brave enough to move through it."