Black dove : a novel

Summary: "From the Scotiabank Giller Prize-shortlisted author of Fall comes a one-of-a-kind story of surviving grief and growing up, and a feverish romp through a world peopled with desperate scribes, mad geneticists, and noble beasts. In a tall and narrow house, on an old, dingy street, lives a young boy named Oliver and his father, an enigmatic writer. It is in this home that he finds an uneasy solace. Though he must live with the constant, hovering darkness left by his absent mother, it is a home filled with stories. Olivers father spins his sorrow into extravagant and fantastical fables to help his son make sense of and survive the cruelties of the world. They are not stories for children which only makes them more captivating. They are tales of the strangest order, of The Black Dove, a flower of mysterious origins; struggles between good and evil; and absolute, undeniable power. These stories speak to Oliver, who every day struggles to simply make it home safely, and he is quickly finding himself running out of excuses to stay late at school to avoid the school bully's murderous fists. Oliver longs for control over his bully, his circumstances, and his own narrative and a man with a genetically modified beast hidden in his backroom may have all the answers that Oliver craves. Equally indebted to the exhilarating coming-of-age fantasia of Stranger Things and the metafictional gut-punch of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, Black Dove crackles with mythic power and sinister electricity, galvanized by the characters, animals, and shimmering monsters that inhabit its pages. Rumbling within McAdam's clear and biting prose is the primal dogma surrounding the human struggle for dominance and conquest: just because we can do something doesn't always mean we should."--Provided by the publisher.