The interconnected stories of Vigil are packed with uncomfortable characters caught in situations of complex morality, with each piece both a chapter in the overall story and also a stand-alone investigation of the concepts of addiction, crime, redemption, and complicity.

Vigil is a collection of interconnected short stories set in the fictional, ex-urban community of Bay Mal Verde, a town that rests between the ocean and the wilderness. A beautiful but harsh environment with few employers and even fewer social resources, residents of Bay Mal Verde must make difficult choices to survive, and these decisions set the characters swinging between self-serving greed and selfless bravery. In Bay Mal Verde, every action has a ripple effect that spreads through the community, making everyone complicit in the lives and deaths of their neighbours.

Advance Praise for Vigil:

“Vigil is holy, it is a prayer, it is sitting with a dying loved one, it is longing, and mourning, it is living in a small town being ravaged by the overdose crisis, it is connection, it is community, it is sexy, it is scary, heartbreaking, and loaded with hope. Susie Taylor seamlessly stitches together the lives and deaths of Bay Mal Verde in this stunning and empathetic portrait of a town brimming with love against all odds. And she does it with unrivaled prose and mastery of the short story. This book cannot be put down. It is contemporary Newfoundland fiction at its finest and most raw.”

Carmella Gray-Cosgrove

“Susie Taylor is a comic writer of the highest order, and in Vigil she offers us a world at once blindingly real and blindingly absurd. In stories as haunted by the possibilities of life as they are by the inevitability of death. Taylor turns her brutally funny gaze to the excesses and inadequacies of a landscape ravaged by addiction, violence, and economic despair. Hilarious and ruthlessly intelligent.”

Avigayle Sharp