Claudia Dey Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Plays

Claudia Dey is a Canadian author and playwright. She is known for novels like ‘Heartbreaker’ and ‘Stunt’.

+Biography
Claudia Dey was born in 1972 in Toronto Canada. Even though her sensibilities are anything but conservative, the author has nothing but good things to say about Toronto, which is known more for its straight-laced mentality than anything else.

Dey, who was born on the same day as Marie Antoinette, grew up in a neighborhood called the Republic of Rathnelly. She left her home city for Montreal for six years and she was happy to do so because Toronto felt stifling.

But when she returned, she found that the city wasn’t quite what she thought it was. In the process of researching her stories, she realized that the denizens of Toronto came in so many shapes and sizes, from sexologists to historians, academics and specialists in female ejaculation.

Claudia Dey’s decision to pursue writing, not to mention the stories and plays she eventually wrote, were heavily inspired by her adventurous childhood. She has vivid memories of the summers she spent in northern Ontario and Alberta, working on lumber camps.

When she wasn’t breaking hearts, Dey was out traversing the country. Though, if she was to highlight one aspect of her childhood that shaped her personality the most, it would have to be music. It is little surprise that music plays such an important role in ‘Heartbreaker’ which is one of the author’s more renowned literary works.

It also makes all the sense in the world that Dey married Don Kerry, a music producer, and drummer for bands like ‘Communism’ and ‘The Rheostatics’.

As a child, Claudia Dey was convinced that books and songs were sentient things. They did not simply speak to her. Rather, Dey felt like she could have conversations with them. They had a way of touching the deepest parts of her soul, touching upon those issues and struggles that the author did not dare mention to other people.

Dey knew very early on that she would find her fortune in the creative fields. Her resume includes stints at McGill University (English Literature) and the National Theater School of Canada (Playwriting).

Her literary debut came in 2008 when she wrote ‘Stunt’. The idea for the novel was inspired by a dream that Dey had in which a girl in a nightgown walked across a tightrope.

The novel she eventually produced from that dream took readers back to Parkdale in the 1980s, telling a story that critics called innovative and genre-pushing.

The success of ‘Stunt’ was all the encouragement the author needed to write ‘Heartbreaker’, a book that explored the mystery of a woman called Billie Jean Fontaine who disappears, leaving her daughter and husband in dire straits.

Even though ‘Stunt’ was her first novel, it was for ‘Heartbreaker’ that Claudia Dey’s fans came to know her. The novel was a decent success, garnering Dey attention from publications like ‘Entertainment Weekly’ and ‘Publishers Weekly’.

Not that many fans of Claudia Dey’s novels know that she is such a celebrated playwright. The author was writing plays long before she tried her hand at novel writing. In fact, ‘The Gwendolyn Poems’, a play of hers from 2002 was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Literary Award.

According to Dey, her experience as a playwright plays an essential role in her work as a novelist. Her playwriting days taught her how to enter fictional spaces and to not only stay within them for long periods of time but to also draw viewers in.

Dey learned to apply that same approach to her novels, creating uniquely memorable settings based on the places she had visited and seen which kept readers completely hooked to the stories she told.

Claudia Dey’s writing process calls for a lot of isolation. She spends more time thinking than she does writing. And she only ever seats down to write when she has a rough idea of her story laid out in her mind.

After that, Dey prefers to pull away from her friends and family and to enter into a form of exile where she does nothing but write. The author has compared her writing process to that of an artist composing an album.

Her goal is to create funny, sometimes gothic stories that allow her to get close to her readers. The books Claudia Dey read as a child felt like they were her friends. She tries to recreate this same experience for her readers, to make her stories come to life in a way that touches everyone that embarks on the journey laid out in her books.

Dey’s work can be found in publications like ‘Lit Hub’ and ‘The Believer’. She has denied suggestions that her stories are autobiographical.

+Stunt
Eugenia Ledoux loved her father, and one assumes that Sheb Woolly loved his daughter. He was a little insane but that only added to his charm. Eugenia loved his antics, this including Sheb’s penchant for taking her fishing in the middle of the night, not to mention nicknaming her ‘Stunt’.

For a little while, Eugenia held onto her father’s promise that he would take her to see the moonscape of North Ontario. But then she woke up one day to find him gone. He was nice enough to leave a note that said he had gone to save the world.

But his words did nothing to console Eugenia who was left alone with her mother, Mink, and sister, Immaculata.

The family saw fit to hold a fake funeral for Sheb, who had blown up a shoulder-pad factory on his way out of town. And then Mink left the family as well. Immaculata found strange comfort in the arms of Leopold, a diseased malcontent down the street that she took to caring for.

But Eugenia stayed the same, dark and diminutive, and she was determined to find her father. So she found a bicycle and went riding into the wide wild world.

+Heartbreaker
Billie Jean Fontaine stumbled into a small town in the middle of nowhere seventeen-years ago, and there she set up roots. Now she has vanished and those closest to her are determined to find her.

They include a girl called Pony who keeps trying to make sense of the advent of her teenage years, a man haunted by his past who is also Billie’s husband, and a boy called Supernatural who wants to be normal.