The Apocalypse of Morgan Turner

Excerpt

The Apocalypse of Morgan Turner

Jennifer Quist

March 2018

Morgan Turner’s grief over her sister’s brutal murder has become a rut, an everyday horror she is caught in along with her estranged parents and chilly older brother. In search of a way out, she delves the depths of a factory abattoir, classic horror cinema -- and the Canadian criminal justice system, as it tries her sister’s killer and former lover, who is arguing that he is Not Criminally Responsible for his actions because of mental illness. Whatever the verdict, Morgan -- with the help of her Chinese immigrant coworkers, a do-gooder, and a lovelorn schizophrenia patient -- uncovers her own way to move on.
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Jennifer Quist is a novelist, poet, and columnist living in Edmonton, Alberta. Nominated for the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Howard O’Hagan Award for her short fiction “Fish Story,” she has had her work published in The Globe and Mail, The National Post, Maclean’s, and Today’s Parent, and has written and voiced introspective personal essays for the CBC Radio One programs Definitely Not the Opera and Tapestry. Her first novel, Love Letters of the Angels of Death (LLP, 2013) nominated for the 2015 International Dublin IMPAC Literary Award and Quist was named the Alberta Lieutenant Governor's Emerging Artist of the Year in 2014. Her other two novels are Sistering (LLP, 2015), longlisted for the Alberta Reader's Choice, and The Apocalypse of Morgan Turner (LLP, 2018).

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What they say

A story of both great disaster and great revelation

Klay Dyer, Vue Weekly

[Quist's] Her characters avoid cliché, rounding into form through a humanizing depth and richness of emotional palette. Her thesis is clear, yet never overwhelming. And her writing is subtle, avoiding, for the most part, the pedantic heavy-handedness that would cripple a writer of lesser skill.
Is The Apocalypse of Morgan Turner a light read? No. But neither was the revelatory Dante’s Inferno, which echoes throughout this novel. And it is the sentiment of Dante’s final lines that, in the end, reverberate most deeply in Morgan’s apocalypse: “From whence we came forth, and once more saw the stars.”
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November 2018, Vue Weekly

"Killer to write"

Scott Hayes, St. Albert Gazette

The author dives right into the messy business of mental illness and how it can keep a perpetrator from criminal responsibility. In this Edmonton-based book, the Turners are not what you would call a close family. That dynamic makes things especially tough when they all must deal with tragedy. Morgan’s sister was in a bad relationship before she is violently murdered by her boyfriend. He claims insanity, leading to the quagmire of legal and medical wrangling that must collectively determine where the truth lies. The Turners, in turn, deal with the fallout in their own individual ways. For her part, Morgan relies on her immigrant co-workers, a schizophrenic, and a Mormon Samaritan to help her through this very intense and troubled time of her life. Despite the seriousness of the work, she describes it as a motley crew in a comic kind of whodunit, coupled with all of the psychological and emotional explorations that one would expect from something so horrific.
Read full review here
April 2018, St Albert Gazette

Sad and brutal, sweet and compelling

Kerry Clare, Pickle Me This

I loved this book. Quist’s narratives are always rich and compelling, and this latest novel is no exception. It’s sad and brutal, but also sweet and funny, and all its characters are so real. It also becomes such a page turner as the story progresses, the trial nearing its end, Morgan’s desperate attempt to be there for the verdict—there is so much tension. We’re also been privy to the lawyer working into the early hours of morning on the case, and how high are the stakes, and what does it all mean? And where do we find that meaning, which is the novel’s central question, and Morgan Turner’s revelation. Revelation being another word for “apocalypse,” which is only just about destruction and devastation as we understand it in the pop-cultural sense, but instead what is revealed by devastation, a divine truth. Or truths, maybe, which is what happens here with the generosity of the people Morgan meets, with what they show her, unwittingly, or otherwise, about this awful, amazing, brutal, beautiful world.
Read full review here
March 2018, Pickle Me This

Jennifer Quist shares the glory

Kerry Clare, 49th Shelf

"The originality of this novel about grief, loss, mental illness and justice is that you feel the pain and laugh out loud. There are no glancing characters here. You see inside everyone. Central character, Morgan, is a memorable masterpiece." -- Fred Stenson

Sensitivity and lyricism

Sarah Lolley, Montreal Review of Books

Readers wanting a fast-paced whodunit should look elsewhere. The Apocalypse of Morgan Turner is for those seeking something graver and richer, more nuanced and thought-provoking, something with no easy ending, however the verdict comes back. They will leave it feeling, as Morgan did after finally seeing the inside of the abattoir, “like any new initiate, considering something that was much less and much more than expected, all at once.”
Read full review here.
May 2018, Montreal Review of Books

Excerpt

The Apocalypse of Morgan Turner

Jennifer Quist

What they say

A story of both great disaster and great revelation

"Killer to write"

Sad and brutal, sweet and compelling

Jennifer Quist shares the glory

Sensitivity and lyricism

Sales

Distribution