Leslie Vryenhoek
Writer & Editor
We All Will Be Received
A Novel
In 1977, a young woman steals a duffel bag of money and flees her bad-news boyfriend. She hitches a ride to the world’s edge and reinvents herself. But decades later, in a roadside motel, stars and satellites align and the past catches up to her.
Eloquent and propulsive, We All Will be Received asks whether redemption is possible in a an ever more interconnected world.
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Named Best Suspense Novel of 2019 by the Next Generation Indie Book Awards.
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Available in stores or ORDER NOW.
Ledger of the Open Hand
A Novel
Ledger of the Open Hand looks at the intimate power of money and emotional debt through the eyes of a young woman trying to own her life.
The novel was short-listed for the prestigious Winterset Award and nominated for the Dublin Literary Award. It won an Independent Publisher Award silver medal in 2016.
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Gulf
Poetry
This debut collection explores the nature of longing and belonging in a transient culture. The poems loosely follow a trajectory from affluent American suburb to rural Canadian prairie town, ricocheting across the continent, toeing the U.S./Canadian border ["that thin line a wide gulf"] until crossing another gulf and arriving in Newfoundland, a place where belonging is a constant allure but always just out of reach.
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Finalist for the national Gerald Lampert Award.
Scrabble Lessons
Short Stories
In Scrabble Lessons, characters who were confined to comfortable patterns are suddenly thrown off their games. These 15 stories examine the longing that pierces the most ordinary days, and elevate those rare moments of acute clarity on which whole lives can pivot and change course.