Bunny and Shark by Alisha Piercy

Finalist for the 2015 ReLit Novel Award

49th Shelf Most-Anticipated 2014 Fall Fiction Preview Selection

From award-winning author Alisha Piercy comes Bunny and Shark, a middle-aged coming-of-age story-cum-shark-adventure that reveals and celebrates women’s power in the trenches. Plunging into the first thirteen days after the ‘bastard’ pushes his ex-Playboy wife ‘Bunny’ over a cliff in the Caribbean, Bunny and Shark is a fable about island survival, and the perils and potentials of being exiled from one’s identity.

Literally lost at sea, Bunny is fueled by the miracle of having been saved from sharks by a band of dolphins. And her continued survival depends on her ability to become a spiritual extension of the landscape: she is the mood of the ocean at night as she swims blindly in it, and the protective coolness of the jungle by day as she recovers from a loss of limb; the close-walled refuge of the sailboats anchored in the harbour, and the sparkling deck of an opulent superyacht when, transformed, she makes a triumphant return to her former world.

Introducing one of the great heroines of contemporary fiction, Bunny and Shark takes readers on a voyage intense with abandon and illumination, in a story that invokes more than a little bit of magic in the telling.

Watch the Book Launch and Reading:

Praise for Bunny and Shark:

“This violent, sensual, heartbreaking story of a worldly-powerful woman’s experience of being cast out, carries us on the unlikely journey of what it is to become otherworldly-powerful …. Teeming with original ideas and dreamy prose, Bunny and Shark is a visceral romp through what it might be like to attain the amphibious, to be alive at the very same time inside the everyday and the numinous.” —Caia Hagel, international art critic, author of Acts of Kindness and Excellence in Times Tables and co-author of the forthcoming +Girl Positive+

Reviews:

“Reaffirms every hero’s (and importantly, every woman’s) right to choose her own name, relationships, and fate.” —National Post

“Experiencing this book … is like swimming in the ocean: it feels both soothing and risky at the same time.” —Quill & Quire

“Bunny’s story glides off the page so easily … Piercy’s writing flows from descriptive to poetic, consistently bringing magical elements to simple scenes, thereby subversively seducing the reader.” —Broken Pencil

Read an exclusive excerpt from Bunny and Shark —Open Book Toronto

“A book that can really only be described as ‘How Stella Got Her Groove—but Not Her Foot—Back’ mixed with Alan Moore-era’s Swamp Thing.” —Evan Munday for All Lit Up Canada

“Alisha Piercy’s Bunny and Shark is both…a juicy, eye-widening adventure and it’s a fragmented, lyrical meditation on change.” —The Rusty Toque

“Bunny and Shark is a rich tale of reflection, reinvention, and retaliation.” —Prism International

“Bunny and Shark is a little like a strange, hyper-sexualized Cinderella story, only this Cinderella is trying to escape her prince … On a greater level, it’s about a Playboy Bunny’s ascribed worth when her time as a prime physical specimen (and little else) is over and done, and what if anything remains of the woman beneath the veneer once she’s been cast aside.” —Andrew Wilmot for All Lit Up Canada

“It is easy for the reader to lose him or herself to the adventure—it really is the kind of paperback you’d want tucked into your bag for a vacation.” —Maisonneuve

“Piercy’s first novel is a no-holds barred wild ride.” —Room Magazine

Interviews and Profiles:

Alicia Piercy in conversation with Malcolm Sutton —Lemon Hound

Writers as Readers: The WAR Series with Alisha Piercy —Open Book Toronto

Character Study: Bunny and Shark —All Lit Up Canada

Praise for Alisha Piercy’s previous work:

“Alisha Piercy’s stunning debut collection pivots between the tumult of lust, the freakishness of the extrasensory, and the menace of our interior worlds. Her prose has the fierce exactitude of dying words, and yet it lulls, beguiles, and winks with its sultriness. It can be sly. It can be horrifying. It can be funny. To hypnotic effect, Piercy achieves that rare feat of capturing the collective strangeness of the human experience. I will never see a crow, an ear, or an island the same way. I will carry this book in my breast pocket. I will read it again and again. Brilliant.” —Claudia Dey

Alisha Piercy is a Montreal-based writer, artist, and painting conservator. Studies in literature, art conservation and print media influence her creative practice, which ranges from drawing installations to sculptural bookworks to the writing of novellas. Her work has been exhibited in various galleries in eastern Canada, with international projects in Iceland and Mexico. Her chapbook You have hair like flags~ won the bpNichol Chapbook Poetry Award in 2010.