Name: Exit Strategies
SKU: 9781990601316
Availability: InStock

A compelling and inventive collection about the ways we leave and the reasons we choose what to leave behind.

Framed within a tale about a journalist investigating choices of life and death, the stories in this collection explore restlessness, belonging, freedom, and mortality. 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 Exit Strategies, it is less about the destination and more about the initial decision to leave. In this daring and inventive debut, Paul Cresey weaves narratives that are sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always utterly captivating.

“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

“One of the most affecting stories, ‘The Crooked Salvor,’ centres on a lonely blackmarket 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

“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

News & Events

Exit Strategies in the BC Review
49th Shelf's Most Anticipated: Spring 2023 Fiction Preview
04/30/23: Paul Cresey, Book Launch for Exit Strategies