Set in the remote Kootenay Valley in western Canada, Once You Break a Knuckle tells stories of good people doing bad things: two bullied adolescents sabotage a rope swing, resulting in another boy’s death; a heartbroken young man refuses to warn his best friend about an approaching car; sons challenge fathers and break taboos. Crackling with tension and propelled by jagged, cutting dialogue, the stories interconnect and reveal how our best intentions are doomed to fail or injure, how our loves can fall short or mislead us, how even friendship – especially friendship – can be something dangerously temporary.

Wilson’s world is always dangerous, barbed with violence and the possibility of betrayal. And yet, in this small, finely-wrought universe, a dogged, wry dignity is usually enough to see us through.

An intoxicating alloy of adrenaline and the kind of vulnerability we would all admit to if we were honest, Once You Break a Knuckle is about the courage it takes just to make it through the day.

 

D W Wilson is the author of a collection of short stories, Once You Break a Knuckle (Hamish Hamilton), which includes the 2011 award-winning BBC National Short Story, The Dead Roads. He is currently working on his first novel Ballistics.

D W Wilson is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia and his stories have appeared in literary magazines in Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom.

He was born and raised in the small towns of the Kootenay Valley, British Columbia, where his father, a corporal of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was stationed for thirteen years. He is a former judoka, former electrician, former independent filmmaker, and now a PhD candidate in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia. Before that, he graduated with honours in philosophy and creative writing from the University of Victoria. He is also the recipient of the University of East Anglia's inaugural MAN Booker Prize Scholarship and the Dean's Postgraduate Studentship.