The Clarion

"We all lined up for our whipping by the shouting beauty and tender traumas of life. All of us so sensitive, and now this beautiful girl, with soft brown hair that was shot with gold in the sun. Another one of us starting to stumble." Peter plays the trumpet and works in a kitchen; Stasi tries to climb the corporate ladder and lands in therapy. These sensitive siblings struggle to find their place in the world, seeking intimacy and belonging-or trying to escape it. A promising audition, a lost promotion, intriguing strangers and a silent lover-in rich, sensual scenes and moody brilliance, The Clarion explores rituals of connection and belonging, themes of intimacy and performance, and how far we wander to find, or lose, our sense of self. Following the literary realist traditions of Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro, Dunic's debut novel captures the vague if hopeful melancholy of any generation that believes it was never "called" to something great. "In prose that is, at times, quietly sensuous, and, at others, rings out with the clarity and purity of a trumpet call, The Clarion delves into the essential truth at the heart of commonplace lives, revealing the loneliness that lurks under everyday routines. The book unravels the disappointments of the pair of siblings at its centre with an incisive tenderness that is as attuned to fleeting moments of joy as it is to the melody of sadness that plays softly but insistently through their days. This is an extraordinary debut with the courage to recognize and reckon with the essential solitude of our moment, a rare novel that is willing to look unflinchingly at our isolation, and that, in doing this, fulfils the promise of fiction to make us less alone."-Aaron Schneider, author of The Supply Chain "With a unique sensitivity, Nina Dunic shares with us the hopefulness and solitude of being an introspective thinker. Her characters, Peter and Stasi, speak to the universality of loneliness through the disenchanting particulars of their own. Beautiful and devastating."-The Miramichi Reader "The Clarion's split narrative of a brother and sister adrift is as darkly comic as it is precise. Dunic is able to distill what it means to be alone with a single line, or look, or colour of the sky. There's a felt pressure below every one of this novel's cloistered fragments, a quiet below the characters' inexorable 'getting by' that so many of us recognize, and it breaks your heart. Here is an exciting new voice in fiction."-Jason Jobin, author of The Wild Mandrake "Dunic's sibling protagonists run parallel, propelled by the constant tension between performance and introspection that can come to define us as people-both who we are and also who we fail to be."-Curtis LeBlanc, author of Sunsetter