SMALL
CHANGE

These superbly crafted twenty linked stories navigate the difficult realm of friendship, charting its beginnings and endings, its intimacies and betrayals, its joys and humiliations.

A mother learns something of the nature of love from watching her young daughter as she falls in and out of favour with a neighbourhood girl. An intricate story of two women reveals a friendship held together by the steely bonds of passivity. A chance sighting in a library prompts a woman to recall the “unconsummated courtship” she was drawn into by a male colleague.

With trenchant insight, uncommon honesty, and dark humour, Elizabeth Hay probes the precarious bonds that exist between friends. The result is an emotionally raw and provocative collection of stories that will resonate with readers long after the final page.

READING GROUP GUIDE:

Reading Group Guide available at Reader’s Guide.

Compelling .... These linked stories are not so much conventional narratives as unflinching meditations on ambivalent love, the only love worth writing about, as John Updike once said. What readers and even literary jurors are responding to is how close to the bone Hay’s fiction is.     Montreal Gazette

Tightly sprung stories, beautifully balanced, and eminently re-readable.     Quill & Quire

Hay brings together in her fourth book the revelatory power of narrative, the analytical possibilities of the personal essay and memoir, the investigative discipline of journalism, and the sudden illumination of lyric, and as a result she seems able to pick up almost everything – everything said, and most of what is only whispered in a gesture or a look between friends.     Malahat Review

Order from your local bookstore.

Canadian edition: Small Change, McClelland & Stewart, 2000,
ISBN 0-7710-3791-0

U.S. edition: Small Change, Counterpoint, 2001,
ISBN 07710-3793-7