Exit Strategies
A prisoner falls in love with his cellmate’s fiancée and breaks out to confess his feelings. A woman journeys from Honduras to the United States in the hope of a better life. Convenience store owners attempt to free themselves from financial burden by withholding evidence to a murder. The characters in Exit Strategies are all in need of a way out, a way forward, a way through. In this daring and inventive debut, Paul Cresey weaves narratives that are sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, and always utterly captivating. Exit Strategies is about the ways we leave and the reasons we choose what to leave behind.
“Paul Cresey’s Exit Strategies is the type of debut that arrives like a foreshock—a book that shakes things up just enough to know that something big is just around the corner.” BC REVIEW (Click to Read)
“A young woman leaves an island to flee a botched date. A nostalgic father sneaks an old friend across the border to help him evade the police. A downtrodden ex-husband searches for aliens to take him on an interstellar adventure. The two dozen subjects of Paul Cresey’s debut story collection, Exit Strategies, share one common theme: they’re searching for ways out…One of the most affecting stories, ‘The Crooked Salvor,’ centres on a lonely black-market dealer who invites an attractive insurance adjuster out for a drink. How will he sell himself?...It’s in these grounded moments of desperation, hopelessness, and regret that Exit Strategies is at its most genuine.” LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA (Click to Read)
“Cresey is fearless. His stories tread the dark, obsessive corners of lives real and imagined and never flinch from what they find. The characters in Exit Strategies are on strange, desperate paths or trapped in prisons of their own design, where truth and fiction are equally strange and absolutely compelling. A terrific debut!” THOMAS WHARTON author of Icefields and The Book of Rain