Finalist, ReLit Award

Finalist, McNally Robinson Book of the Year (Manitoba Book Awards)

Finalist, Bisexual Book Award (USA)

Whitetail Shooting Gallery, a new novel from award-winning author and Giller Prize nominee, Annette Lapointe, is set in the outer urban, often desolate, landscape of the Saskatchewan prairie.

Cousins Jennifer and Jason live close together as small kids, exploring their rural home. They live in adjacent, sometimes overlapping, households. But one act of family violence begets another, and the cousins drift apart. By adolescence, the two are estranged. Jennifer grows closer to her best friend, Donna, an evangelical minister’s daughter who rebels against her family by immersing herself in a world of vectors, fractals, perfect math, and porn.

Jason’s world is hockey. Donna likes his street-hockey bruises. Jason’s also interested in Gordon, a semi-recluse ex-teacher who lives on the periphery of town and constructs art installations from leather, tamarack, animal skulls, and other found items.

Horses, bears, kissing cousins, and other human animals conspire in a series of conflicts that result in accidental gunfire and scarring--both physical and emotional--that takes many years to heal.

Praise for Whitetail Shooting Gallery:

BC Books for BC Schools Pick

“Imagine Alissa York’s Fauna but in rural Saskatchewan and with all the sentimentality stripped away. Imagine lots of sex, kissing cousins, a gunshot to the face, and a set of teeth that get kicked in over and over again. Imagine a family farmhouse, country roads, the kind of place you might want to move to raise your kids if you don’t look too closely. The hockey player, the pastor’s daughter, how he’s giving blow jobs to his teammates, and she’s having sex with her best friend. … Whitetail Shooting Gallery baffled me thoughout, disturbed and troubled me, but it also intrigued me, continually surprised me, never stopped me wondering what would happen next. It’s an anti-pastoral, a complicated portrayal of rural life. … Annette Lapointe’s literary reputation was established with Stolen, which was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2006. And here in her second book, she’s turning Can-Lit on its head, challenging not only her readers’ sensibilities, but also ideas about what a novel should be. And the latter seems to be a requirement for the kind of book that I like best.” (Pickle Me This)

“Wintry, notably offbeat, written with an elegant precision, and at times slyly funny … Lapointe’s beautiful treatment of poète maudit subject matter never fails to impress.” (The Vancouver Sun )

“In Whitetail Shooting Gallery, Lapointe gives us an animalistic view of the teen world. This is not small-town rural life as idyllic or pastoral. Lapointe’s world reflects the turmoil, raging emotions and hormones brewing inside adolescents. … the plot is almost secondary to Lapointe’s vivid, powerful voice and her beautifully savage view of rural prairie life.” (Winnipeg Free Press )

Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2012 Pick, 49th Shelf