Good Citizens Need Not Fear by Maria Reva is a finalist for the 2020 Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.

The $50,000 prize annually recognizes the best in Canadian fiction.

Good Citizens Need Not Fear is a short story collection that revolves around a cast of characters connected to a rundown apartment building in a small, industrial Ukrainian town just before, during and after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Reva is a writer from Vancouver who now lives in Texas. She won the 2018 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for emerging writers for The Ermine Coat. The Ermine Coat appears in Good Citizens Need Not Fear. Good Citizens Need Not Fear is Reva's first book.

You can read an excerpt from Good Citizens Need Not Fear below.

The statue of Grandfather Lenin, just like the one in Moscow 900 kilometres away, squinted into the smoggy distance. Winter's first snowflakes settled on its iron shoulders like dandruff. Even as Daniil Petrovich Blinov passed the statue and climbed the crumbling steps of the town council behind it, he felt the Grandfather's 360-degree gaze on the back of his head, burning through his fur-flap hat.

Inside the town-council hall, a line of hunched figures pressed against the walls, warming their hands on the radiators. Men, women, entire families progressed toward a wall of glass partitions. Daniil entered the line. He rocked back and forth on the sides of his feet. When his heels grew numb, he flexed his calves to promote circulation.

"Next!"

Daniil took a step forward. He bent down to the hole in the partition and looked at the bespectacled woman sitting behind it.

"I'm here to report a heating problem in our building."

"What's the problem?"

"We have no heat." He explained that the building was a new one, this winter was its first, someone seemed to have forgotten to connect it to the district furnace, and the toilet water froze at night.

The clerk heaved a thick directory onto her counter. "Building address?"

"Ivansk Street, No. 1933."

She flipped through the book, licking her finger every few pages. She flipped and flipped, consulted an index, flipped once more, shut the book and folded her arms across it. "That building does not exist, Citizen."

Daniil stared at the woman. "What do you mean? I live there."

"According to the documentation, you do not." The clerk looked over his shoulder at the young couple in line behind him.

Daniil leaned closer, too quickly, banging his forehead against the partition. "1933 Ivansk Street," he repeated, enunciating each syllable.

"Never heard of it."

"I have 13, no, 14 people living in my suite alone, who can come here and tell you all about it," Daniil said. "Fourteen angry citizens bundled up to twice their size."

The clerk shook her head, tapped the book. "The documentation, Citizen."

"We'll keep using the gas, then. We'll leave the stove on day and night." The stove offered little in the way of heating, but Daniil hoped the wanton waste of a government-subsidized resource would stir a response.

The woman raised her eyebrows; Daniil appeared to have rematerialized in front of her. "Address again?"

"Nineteen thirty-three Ivansk Street, Kirovka, Ukraine, USSR. Mother Earth."

"Yes, yes. We'll have the gas-engineering department look into it. Next!"

This excerpt is taken from Good Citizens Need Not Fear, copyright © 2020 by Maria Reva. Reproduced with permission from Penguin Random House Canada.