Two brothers face the impending death of their mother. A convenience store clerk balances compassion with duty. A grieving soldier receives a package of cookies meant for someone else. In the principal's office, young Josh causes trouble to get his mother's attention. Mrs. Stanley peeps in school files and thinks about her newly out husband, John Stanley, who falls in love with the town baker, and Mr. Leopold has an affair with the bakery assistant. These are just a few stories in this series of connected flash fiction pieces, where a group of people navigates the trials of life with tears, arguments and, above all, love and compassion.
The Price of Cookies is a novella-in-flash revolving around a cast of characters living in the same town, where lives intersect in revealing and often poignant ways. The stories artfully weave themes of food, nourishment, love, and loss together while depicting each character's complex relationship with food. These twenty-four stories reach into the depths of heavy reality we don't often get to witness in our friends and neighbours.
Connected by food, friendships, family ties, and sometimes just the luck of living in the same town, the characters in these stories will take readers on a journey through grief, revelation, and ultimately, acceptance.
PRAISE FOR The Price of Cookies
"Lives interwoven and cookies that arrive too late. This bravura collection of linked stories provides a profound lesson in empathy, of pouring yourself into someone else's life, someone else's pain, to see it from the inside, looking out."
- Will Ferguson, Giller-winning author of 419
"The Price of Cookies reveals the price of a great many things: of grief, of love and desire, of heartbreak and indifference, of small joys and great loss. Finnian Burnett's novella … is at once tragic and funny, alive with the full spectrum of human emotion and all the many ways we might be with one another: as lovers, friends, companions, kind strangers or cruel ones, curious neighbours and hopeful parents."
- Christina Myers, award-winning author of The List of Last Chances and Halfway Home
"The brief stories contained here fire like prisms, shining a welcome light into our collective darkness. These linked passages will tear at you, while simultaneously applying empathy and healing. ... We are very lucky to have Burnett."
- Michael Blouin, 2x winner of the ReLit Award for Best Novel, Skin House
"Burnett's ability to weave together these short flash fiction stories, combining common threads of loss, grief, and acceptance, is a wonder to behold. The Price of Cookies is a beautifully shared learning experience seen from the perspective of characters who feel like family. Take these stories a bite at a time and keep coming back for more!"
- Andrew Buckley, Death, the Devil, and the Goldfish
"I can't believe how fast I read this book. Each story is artfully woven with the next; what at first seems like a compendium of short stories becomes an entire town of people looking out for each other, striving to do what is right, and dealing with their pain. Burnett's turn of phrase brings close the tension between desire for community and fear of judgement, all anchored by the universal comfort of a cookie. You won't be able to put it down."
- Veronica Kirin, Stories of Elders and cofounder of Anodyne Magazine
