THE CENTAUR'S WIFE

Following the terrain of Station Eleven, The Leftovers and Neverwhere, comes a story about our world, some steps into the future, steeped in lore and fairy-tale, alive with secret centaurs who live and thrive in the mountains. While the remaining humans, led by Tasha, carve out a thin survival filled with despair, desire and loss.

The world has ended, and everything they know has disappeared. In the wake of destruction wrought by an unforeseen asteroid shower, the lives of two women—Heather, a disabled mother of twins who holds a special relationship to the centaurs in the mountain that towers over her home; and Tasha, a doctor from a faraway seaside city who has fled to the mountains in wake of the disaster –are thrown together.

Tasha busies herself with clearing the damage, establishing routines, and throwing herself into survival logistics, often at the expense of her relationship with others, not least of all her wife, Annie. Drawn to the enigmatic and standoffish Heather for reasons she can't explain, Tasha tries to find a reason for the continued struggle of the mountain city—while the trees and flowers and grass grow huge and tropical around them, the city's survival gardens fail to bring them food. As months go by with no news from the outside world, the people of the city start to starve and retreat into old wives' tales about the mountain and the centaurs.

When catastrophe hits the mountain city again and Heather's true relationship to the mountain and its centaurs is revealed, both women must find a way forward together, through forbidden love and thwarted desire and the echoes of a magic almost gone, and learn how to navigate a world that is dying and being reborn all at once.

AMANDA LEDUC is a disabled author with cerebral palsy whose stories and essays have appeared in publications across Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia, including The Rumpus, The Butter, ELLE Canada, and many others. She has been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the 2015 StoryQuarterly Fiction Prize, the CBC Short Story and Creative Nonfiction Prizes, and the UK Daily Mail First Novel Award. Her first novel, The Miracles Of Ordinary Men, was published in 2013 by Toronto's ECW Press. She lives in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, where she serves as the Communications and Development Coordinator for the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD), Canada's first festival for diverse authors and stories. Leduc's new book Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, And Making Space, comes out in February 2020 with Coach House Books. THE CENTAUR'S WIFE is her second novel, she is at work on her next.