"In Japan, a person's blood type is as important as their horoscope. My type, like my grandmother's, is ab. This makes us universal recipients, able to receive blood from anyone, but give only to each other. A person with ab blood has no immunity to other types. No matter what blood they're given, it becomes a part of them, and they never resist."

Universal Recipients is a beautifully constructed series of fictions about the connective tissue between ourselves and the world around us--the at-times debilitating, yet ultimately liberating life-forces that we cannot contain nor deny. Travelling through different worlds and cultures--Newfoundland, Quebec, Vancouver, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore--the characters in Universal Recipients are often haunted by grief, wearing their tragedies like second skins; yet they move on, seeking and finding solace in small, luminous moments of understanding. Teachers and students, parents and children, men and women breaking down the distance between strangers: their stories are inevitable and necessary, like the blood racing through their veins.

Dana Bath's tales, like quiet, meditative gestures, speak to the universal human truths that exist in all of us, confirming her as one of Canada's new literary talents.