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  • Published by Arsenal Pulp Press (Commonwealth & USA, April/May 2020)

  • Audiobook narrated by Jo Vannicola. Get yours from Libro.fm, Audible, stream it on Spotify, or request it at your local library.

  • Forthcoming (in translation) in Korea.

A finalist for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award

Alani Baum, a non-binary photographer and teacher, hasn't seen their mother since they ran away with their girlfriend when they were seventeen—almost thirty years ago. But when Alani gets a call from a doctor at the assisted living facility where their mother has been for the last five years, they learn that their mother's dementia has worsened and appears to have taken away her ability to speak. As a result, Alani suddenly find themselves running away again - only this time, they're running back to their mother.
Staying at their mother's empty home, Alani attempts to tie up the loose ends of their mother’s life while grappling with the painful memories that—in the face of their mother's disease—they’re terrified to lose. Meanwhile, the memories inhabiting the house slowly grow animate, and the longer Alani is there, the longer they're forced to confront the fact that any closure they hope to get from this homecoming will have to be manufactured.
This beautiful, tenderly written debut novel by Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers winner John Elizabeth Stintzi explores what haunts us most, bearing witness to grief over not only what is lost, but also what remains.

The Best Canadian Fiction of 2020, CBC Books
The Best of the Rest 2020, Ms. Magazine

What people are saying…

“Vanishing Monuments is a remarkable novel, a beautiful puzzle of place and belonging, identity and vocation, duty and love. John Elizabeth Stintzi’s writing is full of welcome and true surprise—I found myself underlining passages on every page, and then going back to underline more.”

—John K. Samson, singer and songwriter

“The real pleasure of reading John Elizabeth Stintzi's novel is to see a sensitive mind work through an internal landscape, and to watch them do it with such patience and generosity.”

—Sara Majka, author of Cities I've Never Lived In

“A camera ‘takes time and holds it still,’ says the narrator’s mother, and reading Monuments is like sifting through a darkroom and watching scenes emerge and accrue into an assemblage of life. Memory haunts this novel, at once elusive and inescapable. Like the narrative itself, it loops, layers, seizes, erodes. And John Elizabeth Stintzi conjures it all with a gorgeously queer, off-kilter grace.”

—Chelsey Johnson, author of Stray City

“Vanishing Monuments is a languishing, beautiful portrait of disassociation at once between countries, family, gender, identities, and, most importantly, “the distance between…you and yourself”. Stintzi braids the Metamorphoses together with the expansiveness of Winnipeg, those rolling prairies, all wondrously and ravenously superimposed together to form a work that is wet with memory. With a keen eye for image and an attuned ear for the whistling screams of Manitoba, we move slowly but steadily through the memory palace that is a childhood home abandoned—here, memory serves to animate said house with a beckoning siren call that asks us to conceptualize the art of staying affectively with a mother whittling away from dementia and a narrator storytelling from a double exposed aperture. An absolute monumental achievement of a first novel!”

—Joshua Whitehead, author of Jonny Appleseed

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PS: I don’t believe in providing a link to purchase or pre-order it on Am*zon, but I acknowledge that Capitalism has failed us and some may not have the means to buy it elsewhere. So please feel free to support this book through whatever site/resource is most accessible to you!