Industrial Roots
“An extraordinary, spikey and stylish collection of interlinked stories following working-class women and their lives in Ontario.” Rachael Allen, Granta Books of the Year 2023
Rooted in the oral tradition of storytelling, Industrial Roots is an exceptional collection of domestic vignettes narrated by different female characters. The stories in this book concern mainly the daily experiences of blue-collar life amongst the members of a working class family in Ontario. A woman that wants to steal babies, alcoholic husbands, sisters in love with the same man, aging parents, absent fathers – all have a place in the stories these women tell. Lisa Pike uses a variety of registers, from slang to standard English, to shape the characters’ stories. A playful use of the English language that dissolves the boundaries between the oral and written traditions.
Lisa Pike
Lisa Pike was born in Windsor, Ontario. She studied in France, worked in Italy, and completed her PhD at the University of Toronto. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in magazines and anthologies including CV2, The New Quarterly, Riddle Fence, Re: Generations: Canadian Women Poets in Conversation and VIA: Voices in Italian Americana. She is the author of a poetry chapbook, Policeman’s Alley; and a novel, My Grandmother’s Pill (Guernica Editions 2014).