Ronsdale Press to publish debut novel

Joanna Lilley's fourth book and first novel, Worry Stones, is being published by Ronsdale Press in the autumn of 2018.

The publisher describes the novel as the 'captivating, beautifully-observed story of a daughter's efforts to reunite her family, a dream she believed she'd given up long ago.'

Worry Stones carries readers across continents, from the Canadian tundra to the south of England and north again to Scotland. When British art historian Jenny finds out her mother is seriously ill in hospital, she knows that any normal daughter would rush to her mother's bedside. But she hasn't had anything to do with her mother for eight years. Is it time to attempt a reunion she never thought would happen?

Joanna's debut novel is a compelling portrait of the devastation that befalls a family when relationships are broken, ambition is stifled and loyalties are divided. Find out more about Worry Stones.

Hear Joanna read from If There Were Roads

At the launch of If There Were Roads
at Baked Café, Whitehorse, in 2017
(Photograph by Tony Gonda)

Joanna Lilley is giving readings from her second poetry collection, If There Were Roads, thanks to support from the Government of Yukon's Touring Artist Fund. She has readings coming up in Vancouver, Victoria and Alaska and has already visited Muenster, Winnipeg, Toronto and Scotland this year. Find out about dates and venues.

If There Were Roads was published by Turnstone Press, a press Joanna has long admired from afar. (They're in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and she's all the way away in Whitehorse, Yukon.) The poems in the collection emerged out of a nostalgia for the many places Joanna has lived and her slow evolution into a Canadian immigrant fulfilling a dream to go north. You can buy If There Were Roads online or if you're in Yukon you can get it at Mac's Fireweed Books in Main Street, Whitehorse.

This is what the publisher says about If There Were Roads: 'Guided by the geography of land and mind, the familiar and the unknown converge in If There Were Roads by Joanna Lilley. Pulled like the tide between the sea and the shore, If There Were Roads drives toward new vistas while reflecting on what has been lost in the process of moving forward. Lilley’s poems explore the paths we take from here to there when there are no roads to guide us.'

And some other kind words about the collection:

‘Joanna Lilley claims in her poem “Two Ghosts” that “it wasn’t supposed to be about the people,” yet that is exactly what If There Were Roads is about—people and what they do to the bodies of animals; people on journeys accompanied by ghosts, and myth, and crows; people both lost and at home. Lilley’s journey takes us into the cycles of the seasons where certainty exists only in acute observation and reflection. If There Were Roads is haunting and luscious, full of place and heart.’

– Micheline Maylor, Little Wildheart

‘Poems of place and displacement, of leaving home and finding home, move seamlessly through inner and outer landscapes in Lilley’s lively, evocative collection. Arresting and captivating, If There Were Roads is poetry brimming with new ways of seeing.’

– Catherine Graham, The Celery Forest