The Peony Season

Journey from Zaire to Winnipeg to Ukraine and through the human spirit with an arrangement of characters and stories living in seasons but whose passages are perennial. Klassen’s characters transcend their various circumstances to explore personal experiences with an awareness of larger social issues—contemporary and historical.

These stories reflect a recurring tension between a desire for solitude and a lesser attraction towards companionship and community, between wanting to enter other people's stories and lives and wanting to remain separate, a stranger. There is an ease of movement between lightness and gravity, between the serious and the comic.