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Winner, 2016 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Fiction
Finalist, 2016 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize
The stories in Specimen are a unique exploration of science and the human heart; the place where physical reality collides with our spiritual and emotional lives.
In “The Blood Keeper,” a young academic travels to North Korea to work on her dissertation and embarks on a dangerous affair. In “Mamochka,” which was nominated for the 2012 Journey Prize, an archivist at the Institute for Physics in Minsk, must come to terms with her daughter’s marriage to a Chinese man in Vancouver. In “Peptide P,” scientists study a disease that seems to affect children after they eat hotdogs. In “Side Effects,” a woman’s personality is altered, and not necessarily for the better, by botox injections. In “The Big One,” a woman and her daughter find themselves trapped in the rubble of an underground parking garage after an earthquake.
Stylistically varied and with settings that range from North Korea and Minsk to Vancouver and Gdansk, Kovalyova is daring and confident new voice in Canadian fiction.
“To read Irina Kovalyova is to peer through a microscope and discover worlds infinitely big and exquisitely small. These stories are luminous. They capture light. They cast sharp shadows. They take root in your heart. I have never read stories like these, and I long to read more. Rare specimens, indeed.” — Jessica Grant, author of Come, Thou Tortoise, winner of the Amazon First Novel Award