Keep by Jenny Haysom

A timely tale of ownership and loss, loneliness and connection, and a meditation on all the stuff in our lives.

Home staging is an art of erasure. But in some casesno matter how much clutter you remove, or how many coats of white paint you applystains bleed through, and memories rise from the walls like ghosts. Harriet, an elderly poet whose eccentricities have been compounded by years of living alone, must sell her beloved house. Having been recently diagnosed with dementia, she is being moved into a care facility against her wishes. When stagers Eleanor and Jacob are hired for the job, they quickly find themselves immersed in Harriet's brimming and mysterious world, but as they struggle to help her, their own lives are unravelling.

Keep is a meditation on all the stuff in our livesfrom the singular, handcrafted artifact to indelible, mass-produced plastics. As Jenny Haysom excavates the material of our domestic spaces, she centres the people within them and celebrates the power of memory, even when it falters. (From House of Anansi Press)

• 64 works of Canadian fiction to read in fall 2024
• Books by past CBC Poetry Prize winners and finalists being published in 2024

Jenny Haysom is a writer from Nova Scotia. Her debut poetry collection,Dividing the Wayside, won the Archibald Lampman Award and wasshortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.She has published her writing in magazines across Canada.

Haysom waslonglisted for the 2013 CBC Poetry Prize.