Coming April 20, Carrick Publishing!
Pull up your favorite rocker and join us for this unforgettable collection of tales from the old country by master story-teller Catherine Astolfo.
Highly-relatable and presented in a voice that is both tough as nails and poignant, Auntie Beers will touch your heart. From Ireland’s tragic famine to the early immigrant days in Canada, Auntie Bairbre and her family struggle against poverty and prejudice to carve out a better life. But the heart has a long memory, and it cannot shake its abiding love for the home it left behind.
Reminiscent of Alice Munro–these stories are heart-wrenching, authentic, and luminous.
~ Ginger Bolton, author of the Deputy Donut Mysteries
Auntie Beers is an amalgam of tales told to the author by her mother, as well as a mystery that she couldn’t resist sharing.
Witty, raw and often poignant, these are tales for the ages by one of Canada’s leading modern authors.
Excerpt: She Died as She Lived
Auntie Beers 1960-1965
Urbston (near Toronto, Ontario)
If only the bullet had veered to the left just a smidge, our great-aunt would have been awarded the “longest-to-have-been-a-resident-of-the-Queen’s-Hotel.”
The very next week, Stu Burnside received the honor instead. It included a case of beer and a gift certificate to Perk’s Family Restaurant, both of which Auntie Beers would have appreciated.
Sitting here at my desk, I realize now that my great-aunt died the way she lived. Auntie Beers always stood in the middle of “if only/when” and “then.” Constantly revising the past in hopes for a different future.
“If only I had been born rich instead of the ravishing beauty that I am,” she cackled, tossing a cigarette butt over the porch.
“When I get that job, I plan to lord it over the rest of you,” she declared, dressed in a business suit destined to hang in her closet from that day forth.
“When my mother dies, sorry to say but then I’ll be free.” A pause and a wink. “But not sorry.”
“If only the lads had had a brain, we’d’ve been landowners instead of farmhands,” was her critique of male choices in our family.
If only the bullet had veered to the left. When she got involved in a shooting match. Then she would have been Queen for A Day of the Queen’s Hotel.
From “She Died as She Lived”, Auntie Beers, Catherine Astolfo. Carrick Publishing, 2024
About the author: Catherine Astolfo is an award-winning author of mystery short stories and novels. She is a Derrick Murdoch award winner for service to Crime Writers of Canada and a Past President.
Catherine’s a member of Crime Writers of Canada, Sisters in Crime and The Mesdames of Mayhem.
Visit Catherine at her author page.
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