Why I’m Here

by Jill Frayne

A GG-award-nominated memoirist’s debut novel!

Fifteen-year-old Gale is desperate to get out of Whitehorse, a fact that is immediately clear to counsellor Helen Cotillard when Gale reluctantly walks into her office with her stepmother. It’s 1995, and one counselling agency for kids and families serves all of the Yukon. Gale has been having anxiety attacks, the last one so severe it landed her in the hospital. Helen soon begins to realize that Gale’s distress at being separated from her little sister Buddie too closely parallels a calamity from her own past. This tragic similarity leaves Helen uneasy about her profession and her ability to help her clients. When Gale does escape back to her home in Cobalt, Ontario, to protect Buddie from their brutal mother, she risks her own future. Through arresting, compelling images, Jill Frayne shows both the fierce beauty of the Yukon, and the damaged, enduring landscapes of two human hearts.

Trade Paperback / May 1, 2022 isbn 10: 1-77439-049-3

isbn 13: 978-1-77439-049-8

BISAC 1: FIC045000 BISAC 2: FIC077000 BISAC 3: FIC019000 288 pp / 5.5 x 8.5 / $21.95 cdn $17.95 usd “From the boreal forests of the Yukon to Canadian Shield country in Ontario, Frayne writes with graceful, devastating power about the hold of place and family on people, and the way love runs strange and wayward and deep through both.”

~ Kate Harris, author of Lands of Lost Borders

About The Author

Jill Frayne worked for many years as a family counsellor in Toronto and central Ontario. Following a solo journey to Canada’s West Coast and Yukon Territory, her travel memoir, Starting Out in the Afternoon, was published by Random House. Since then, her outdoor adventure articles have appeared in several Canadian publications: The Walrus, Explore Magazine, Up Here, Canadian Geographic, to name a few. She divides her time between a maple woods in Central Ontario and the mountains around Atlin, BC. Why I’m Here is her first novel.

ADDITIONAL SALES POINTS

• Travel memoir was nominated for a Governor General’s Award in Nonfiction. • Part of the Nunatak First Fiction Series, Canada’s longest-running debut fiction series.

MARKETING PLAN

• Early digital ARC and international press release mailout. • Announcement of book’s release by email newsletter and on the NeWest Press Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter pages. • Podcast reading/interview posted on iTunes, RSS feed, social media, and NeWest website. • Press releases and review mailouts to various CBC outlets across the nation, both radio and television. • Submit to all eligible awards. • Ads in Alberta Views (Read Alberta Books Campaign), BC BookWorld, Glass Paper, Library Bound, Prairie Books NOW,

PRISM international, and the ULS Super Forthcoming Catalogue. • Launch events in Vancouver, Victoria, and Edmonton, as well as online.

MARKETS

• National trade: literary and general fiction • US and UK trade: literary and general fiction • Whitehorse, YK, and rural ON

COMPARISON TITLES

• A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson (978-0-735281-27-1, Knopf Canada, 2021) • The Opening Sky by Joan Thomas (978-0-771083-94-5, McClelland & Stewart, 2015) • Some People’s Children by Bridget Canning (978-1-155081-12-3, Breakwater Books, 2020)