Fierce - Softcover

The influence of Hannah Holborn’s various parents — foster and otherwise — has lent her fiction a unique blend of British humour, Slavic melancholy, naturalism, and First Nations sensibility. She has taught life skills to aboriginal women, inner-city youth, and the mentally ill, and her prize-winning stories have appeared in numerous journals including, Room of One’s Own and Front and Centre. She is writing a novel in Gibsons, British Columbia.

“Like Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air, Fierce benefits from its largely northern setting, a still under-explored back road in Canadian fiction. . . . Penetrating and smart and a welcome antidote to the current vogue for alleged family values. . . . Treat yourself to its unique mix of irreverence, compassion and horse laughs. And then pass it along to a loved one.”
— National Post

“As strong a first collection as we have any right to hope. . . . Holborn repeatedly demonstrates her skill in handling utterly disparate, and wholly unique, characters in surprising, and often surprisingly effective, ways. . . . River Rising, the novella that rounds out the book [is] a painful, often funny, bitingly realistic yet archly surreal story [that] seems to burst at the seams with life.”
— Edmonton Journal

“[Fierce has] a bracing farcical edge that could hardly be blacker. . . . Holborn’s double high-wire act leaps effortlessly between funny and tragic. . . . [Her] visuals are cinematic.”
— The Globe and Mail

“The best stories . . . embody whole worlds. Such is true of the tough tales in Fierce. . . . The sassy grit of her characters and their tenacious humour — wry, raw, even twisted — get them through. Now and then, naked emotion pierces through their stubborn wit, like a shard of glass.”
— Montreal Gazette

“Holborn’s collection of stories is electric with wit and insight. Sassy, sexy, full of willful women, nasty business, a few freaks, some drunks, acts of adultery and abandonment, the voice of God and veins of gold. It’s fierce.”
— Lisa Moore, author of Alligator and Open

“Holborn, a gutsy writer from British Columbia, fills the pages of her latest collection with . . . one-of-a-kind characters, in stories that run the gamut from unfortunately heartbreaking to unaccountably hopeful.”
— Canadian Living