Stephen Leacock Award finalist and CBC Short Short Prize winner Amy Jones is publishing a new novel this year. Pebble & Dove will be published on May 30, 2023.

Jones is a writer from Nova Scotia who now lives in Hamilton, Ont. Her books include the novels We're All in This Together and Every Little Piece of Me and the short story collection What Boys Like. Jones won the 2006 CBC Short Story Prize.

Pebble & Dove is the story of Lauren, a woman who is deep in debt and in the midst of a divorce, and her teenager daughter Dove. The two are in Florida, staying at Lauren's late estranged mother's trailer. Lauren is trying to escape her life, while Dove is trying to escape her current circumstances. Dove ends up discovering the abandoned Flamingo Key Aquarium and Tackle, where Pebble, the world's oldest manatee in captivity, still resides. What unfolds is a darkly humorous story of a family falling apart, and coming back together again, thanks in part to an unlikely source of inspiration: Pebble.

"I have always been fascinated by manatees and I had this idea to write a novel about how the lives of a small group of people are changed by their encounters with the oldest living manatee in captivity. The manatee's peaceful nature, resilience, curiosity and vulnerability makes them so immensely relatable and a perfect conduit for the themes and ideas I wanted to explore in this book: the complicated relationship between mothers and daughters, the slipperiness of memory, and how deeply we can still love someone we don't understand," Jones told CBC Books via an emailed statement.

Read an excerpt from Pebble & Dove below.

It's late in the evening when Lauren and Dove finally reach Swaying Palms, south of Sunset, Florida, and just off the Tamiami Trail, that stretch of highway beginning in Tampa that hugs the Gulf Coast before veering off across the Everglades to Miami. Lauren nearly misses the turn — the faded sign is almost entirely obscured by a trio of dogwoods heavy with blooms, the streetlight above flickering like a strobe.

Beside Lauren, her daughter rests her head against the window, feet tucked beneath her. Dove has barely said a word since they left Lennox Heights 16 hours ago, other than to ask how much further they have to go. But her curiosity gets the better of her as the car slows. She lifts her head, takes out her earbuds, and peers into the dark as they make their way through the eerily quiet grid of identical white trailers and neatly manicured squares of lawn. They creep down smooth, asphalt roads lined with streetlights and palm trees that do, in fact, sway in the evening breeze, casting shadows onto signs that say things like 'Welcome to Paradise' or 'I'm on vacation time.' The inhabitants of Swaying Palms are mostly retirees from the Midwest or Canada; most of them don't even stay for the entire year, packing up and driving back to Michigan or Ontario as soon as the temperature rises above 85. But now, in mid-February, there is a sensible, just-washed sedan tucked into every driveway, the light of a television flickering behind each drawn blind.

The trailer belonging to Lauren's mother is lonely and unadorned in the midst of all this ordered chaos — windows shuttered, garden fallow. It's been uninhabited since Imogen died almost three months ago, and it certainly looks it. As she pulls into the driveway, Lauren notices someone has been tending to the landscaping — the lawn is freshly mown, and the palmettos have been trimmed back, away from the eavestrough. Even the driveway appears to have been recently power-washed. Thank god for small miracles.

"Well," she says, cutting the engine. "We're here."

Neither of them moves. Outside, the cicadas are singing at a frequency that works its way under Lauren's skin like an itch. Her body buzzes with forward momentum, but there is nowhere else to go. Suddenly, it's as if the weight of everything she's been trying not to think about has settled on her chest, like a heavy lead ball. She closes her eyes and tries to visualize rolling the ball off a cliff into a deep, bottomless chasm, but all she can picture is it rolling back over her.

"Is Dad coming?" Dove asks.

The sound of her voice startles Lauren's eyes open. "Daddy's in Peru, I told you," she says, her hands clenching involuntarily in her lap.

Dove rolls her eyes. She hasn't called Jason "Daddy" in years. "He's coming home in a few days."

"I know." Lauren's nails dig into her palms. It hadn't occurred to her until now that the text she got from Jason might not have been the only one he sent. "We'll see. Depends on how long we're going to be here."

How long are we going to be here? Dove's unspoken question hangs in the air, but Lauren is fluent in Dove's silences. She wishes she had an answer for her — to this, and to all the other questions that float between them.

Lauren opens the car door and steps outside. The humidity hits her like a damp towel, her hair immediately beginning to frizz above her ears. Around her, the darkness hums with life, the air thick with night-bloom and something else, a subtle rot beneath the surface.

"This is going to be really great," she says. "You'll see. A little vacation, just you and me." She turns around and peers back into the car. But Dove is already gone.

Inside the trailer, Lauren flips the light switch and is surprised when a dim bulb in the middle of the room flickers to life. In the dusty glow, she gazes around the main room, which contains the kitchen, with a rickety card table, and a living room with a pullout couch, a wicker rocking chair, a shelf with a few books on it, and a television. To the right is the bedroom and the bathroom, and to the left is the sunroom. The kitchen appliances are a dingy off-white, and the floor is covered in pale yellow linoleum, bulging from the humidity and littered with insect carcasses. A tall lamp has toppled over. When she picks it up, a gecko springs out from under the shade and scurries across the room.

Lauren puts her duffle bag down on the table. So this is it, she thinks. This is where my mother spent her final days. She was expecting at least a quick whiff of Imogen's American Spirits, or a lowball glass with her signature wine-coloured lipstick on the rim. But nothing about this place feels like Imogen, and she doesn't know if this is because there really isn't anything of Imogen left here, or because she wouldn't recognize it if there was.