Night Watch: The Vet Suite

Fiction. Full of humour and compassion, NIGHT WATCH collects three novellas that explore the lives of rural veterinarians. Wigmore's vets struggle to stay awake during unending calving seasons, reaching for moments of stillness and grace between phone calls and farm calls; they balance their own family's births and deaths with shepherding animals through caesareans and euthanasia, covering miles of road in their vast jurisdictions during harsh winters and muddy, ruthless springs. Travelling from small towns in northern BC to the south of France and Fiji, sometimes in the span of a night and sometimes over a lifetime, the men and women in NIGHT WATCH work with their hands, keep their hearts in check, and strain to define themselves against the backdrop of an unforgiving job that puts them at the mercy of the elements--and each other.

Veterinary medicine threads through NIGHT WATCH: think James Herriot crossed with a gothic Canadian sensibility. There's gore, sex, and gentleness; close calls, strange alliances, softening bodies; bruises and blood. Wigmore's sentences sing: clear, surprising, and delightful. The writing is as bracing as the changing seasons in rural British Columbia, where much of the suite is set. Wigmore takes us outside, outdoors, in all weathers, and inside, into the secret lives of domesticated animals, their suffering and pleasures a mirror for the confusion of our own.--Carrie Snyder