Bitter Lake

Front Cover
The Porcupine's Quill, Sep 8, 2014 - Fiction - 180 pages

Professional organizer Zoe Lemonopolous finds herself in her mid-thirties, well employed, married to a sensible and kind if dull dentist—and pregnant. She’s agreed to have the baby but cannot imagine herself as a mother. Although her life has all the hallmarks of the successful adult existence she was sure she wanted, she senses her life spiralling out of control. Everything is further turned upside down when she reluctantly agrees to spend a week away from her carefully composed life in trendy downtown Calgary.

Zoe returns to rural Concord, her childhood home near the shores of Bitter Lake, to help pack her parents’ belongings and move them into seniors’ housing. There, she clashes terribly with her troubled younger sister, is shocked by the signs of her parents’ aging, and has a passionate affair with an old high school crush, Kyle, who makes her wonder what might have been.

On the shores of Bitter Lake, Zoe must come to grips with the tragically bad decision that has haunted her family for decades so that she can put the past behind her and begin charting the course of her future.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
7
Section 2
14
Section 3
26
Section 4
31
Section 5
34
Section 6
41
Section 7
44
Section 8
50
Section 15
107
Section 16
114
Section 17
119
Section 18
127
Section 19
131
Section 20
138
Section 21
145
Section 22
152

Section 9
57
Section 10
67
Section 11
71
Section 12
77
Section 13
82
Section 14
90
Section 23
158
Section 24
162
Section 25
166
Section 26
168
Section 27
174
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About the author (2014)

Born in Edmonton to immigrant parents, Marika Deliyannides lived in Greece for a short time before moving back to Alberta at the age of six. Her family lived in a rural town that shares many similarities with the fictional town of Concord—including the nearby lake where teenagers cruised on summer nights. Bitter Lake is her literary debut. An excerpt of the book was awarded the Brenda Strathern Prize for most promising first fiction and was also published in Alberta Views Magazine as winner of its annual fiction contest.

Deliyannides is a graduate of the University of Alberta’s English program, has published several short stories in literary magazines, and has been a business writer in Edmonton and Calgary, producing magazine articles, business copy and speeches.

She lives with her husband and two children, working from her home office overlooking the oil and gas towers of downtown Calgary.

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