This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories

An insightful and masterfully crafted collection of stories from the prize-winning author of The Sentimentalists

The characters in these note-perfect stories tend to make their most important discoveries by stumbling against them…The writing here is an absolute joy to read; clear, economical and condensed.

Funny, thoughtful and oblique, Skibsrud’s stories explode with sudden meaning.

What is it about Canada that keeps on producing some of the best short stories writers in the world?  The latest of the younger generation and the most talked about is Johanna Skibsrud.  It’s a name that might be hard to remember, but her stories are difficult to forget.

Johanna Skibsrud is the author of two collections of poetry. The Sentimentalists, her first novel, won the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada's most prestigious literary award. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.

These loosely connected hypnotic stories about memory and desire, from Giller Prize winner Johanna Skibsrud, introduces us to an astonishing array of characters who time and again find themselves face to face with what they didn’t know they didn’t know, at the exact point of intersection between impossibility and desire. 
 
A young maid at a hotel in France encounters a man who asks to paint her portrait, only later discovering that he is someone other than who we think he is. A divorced father who fears estrangement from his thirteen-year-old daughter allows her to take the wheel of his car, realising too late that he’s made a grave mistake. Taking readers from South Dakota to Paris, to Japan, into art galleries, foreign apartments, farms and beach hotels, This Will Be Difficult to Explain is a masterful and perceptive series of tales from one of fiction’s brightest new voices.

The Sentimentalists

The Giller prize-winning novel: an astonishing debut from a major new discovery

Remarkable ... will stay with you long after you read the last page.

Deeply moving ... I was engrossed by the elegant plotting and intelligent writing ... I was, simply, moved to tears

Rich, evocative prose reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson ... loaded with emotional resonance.

Beautiful ... subtle, sharp and truthful

An outstanding novel ... the emotional power is relentless. A sense of longing courses through the narrative, yet the irony of the title is well served; this is an intelligent, reserved novel, and is all the more moving for the restrained dignity that conveys not only the regrets but also the anger... an allusive, intelligent and solemn work

Sober, reflective, sometimes lyrical, always intelligently probing... remarkably accomplished for a first novel

A probing exploration - now subtle, oblique, now forensic, scalpel-sharp - of the ramifications of a person's experience through the lives and relationships of those he loves. Of the way in which what we do, and witness, echoes through our lives, and the next generation's.

With its themes of memory and remembrance, presence and absence, it is a beguiling story that lingers in the liminal spaces between what is said and unsaid...This is a slender novel, but its dimensions belie how much it packs in...Skibsrud, an acclaimed poet, shows her talent for elegant economy in her slow layering of mood. Densely rich, her novel demands concentrated reading, but the result is often haunting, plumbing both the unreliability of memory and its characters' inner states with emotional immediacy. With its ghosts, its keen awareness of surface tension, and its nimble dips below, The Sentimentalists succeeds in hinting at the truth of a person's life, located somewhere in between the visible and invisible.

A beautiful tribute to a father-daughter relationship.

The writing here is trip-wire taut as the exploration of guilt, family and duty unfold.

Johanna Skibsrud is the author of two poetry collections, Late Nights With Wild Cowboys, which was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, and I Do Not Think that I Could Love a Human Being. Originally from Meadowville, Nova Scotia, Skibsrud currently lives in Montreal. The Sentimentalists, which won the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, is her first novel.

Haunted by the horrific events he witnessed during the Vietnam War, Napoleon Haskell is exhausted from years spent battling his memories. As his health ultimately declines, his two daughters move him from his trailer in North Dakota to Casablanca, Ontario, to live with the father of a friend who was killed in action. It is to Casablanca, on the shores of a man-made lake beneath which lie the remains of the former town, that Napoleon's youngest daughter also retreats when her own life comes unhinged. Living with the two old men, she finds her father in the twilight of his life and rapidly slipping into senility. With love and insatiable curiosity, she devotes herself to learning the truth about him; and through the fog, Napoleon's past begins to emerge.

Johanna Skibsrud

A searingly beautiful book, at once a sweeping historical epic and an intimate mediation on faith and memory … so intelligent, so compassionate, so moving—and above all so gorgeously written—that it’s impossible to put down. She is an astonishingly good writer.

Recalls Ian McEwan’s Atonement … it is exhilarating to join a novelist working at these bracing heights.

Skibsrud makes places and periods incredibly vivid, dancing through the 20th century and easily linking world events to the personal lives of her characters.

Intricate [and] ambitious … a haunting meditation on responsibility with vivid glimpses of history, and a distinctive and nuanced voice.

Quartet for the End of Time is a brilliant work of art, and it is brilliant in so many ways – its dense, rich, and immaculate prose, its vivid evocation of a watershed period in American history, its high-stakes political and personal drama, and, above all, its intimate and completely compelling portraits of human beings struggling to do the right thing under ambiguous moral circumstances. This wholly realized book has everything I crave in a work of fiction.

Skibsrud reminds us how family members treat each other during political upheaval – and how war is an extension of domestic policy by other means.

A mesmerising tale of love, justice and the connections that transcend the passage of time, from the Giller prize-winning author Johanna Skibsrud. 
 
The year is 1932, and America is roiling with unrest. Angry World War One veterans, embittered by the ruinous poverty inflicted by the Great Depression, join forces and, calling themselves the Bonus Army, march on Washington to demand payment of the wartime bonus promised them for their service during the war. 
 
Arthur and Douglas Sinclair, an impoverished veteran and his son, make the arduous journey from Kansas to join the march. Alden and Sutton Kelly, the rebellious children of a powerful Washington judge, become involved with the veterans’ struggle, causing an irreparable rift in the Kelly family. When the Bonus march explodes in a violent clash between government and veteran forces, Arthur is falsely accused of conspiracy and disappears. The lives of Douglas, Alden, and Sutton are forever changed – linked inextricably by the absence of Arthur Sinclair. 
 
As these three lives unfold, we are taken to unexpected places – from the underground world of a Soviet spy to Hemingway’s Florida and the hard labour camps of Roosevelt’s New Deal Projects in the Keys; from occultist circles in London to occupied Paris and the eventual fall of Berlin; and finally, to the German prison camp where French composer Olivier Messiaen originally wrote and performed his famous Quartet for the End of Time. Taking us on an unforgettable journey through individual experience and memory against the backdrop of seismic historical events, Quartet for the End of Time is both a profound meditation on human nature and an astonishing literary accomplishment from one of the most original voices to have emerged in recent years.

Johanna Skibsrud

Praise for Quartet for the End of Time

A searingly beautiful book, at once a sweeping historical epic and an intimate mediation on faith and memory … so intelligent, so compassionate, so moving—and above all so gorgeously written—that it’s impossible to ...

Recalls Ian McEwan’s Atonement … it is exhilarating to join a novelist working at these bracing heights.

Skibsrud makes places and periods incredibly vivid, dancing through the 20th century and easily linking world events to the personal lives of her characters.

A searingly beautiful book, at once a sweeping historical epic and an intimate mediation on faith and memory … so intelligent, so compassionate, so moving—and above all so gorgeously written—that it’s impossible to ...

Recalls Ian McEwan’s Atonement … it is exhilarating to join a novelist working at these bracing heights.

Skibsrud makes places and periods incredibly vivid, dancing through the 20th century and easily linking world events to the personal lives of her characters.

A searingly beautiful book, at once a sweeping historical epic and an intimate mediation on faith and memory … so intelligent, so compassionate, so moving—and above all so gorgeously written—that it’s impossible to ...

Recalls Ian McEwan’s Atonement … it is exhilarating to join a novelist working at these bracing heights.

Skibsrud makes places and periods incredibly vivid, dancing through the 20th century and easily linking world events to the personal lives of her characters.

Books by Johanna Skibsrud

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