A man recalls his father's advice on how to save a drowning person, but struggles when the time comes to use it. A wife's good deed leaves a couple vulnerable at the moment when they're most in need of security—the birth of their first child. Newly in love, a man preoccupied by accounts of freak accidents is befallen by one himself. In stories about love and fear, idealisms and illusions, failures of muscle and mind and all the ways we try to care for one another, Steven Heighton's Instructions for the Drowning is an indelible last collection by a writer working at the height of his powers. (From Biblioasis)

Steven Heighton was an Ontario novelist, short story writer and poet. He received the 2016 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry for The Waking Comes Late. His recent books include Reaching Mithymna: Among the Volunteers and Refugees on Lesvos, a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, and Selected Poems 1983-2020. In 2021, Heighton released his first album, The Devil's Share. Heighton died in April 2022.