COLD CHAOS:
Stories From A North

The
Story

COLD CHAOS, Stories from a North, is Nathalie Guilbeault’s first collection of short stories.

Set in northern Quebec, where the author lived most of her adolescent years, the stories decompose the emotional and physical realities of living between the 49th and 55th northern parallels, inside the peacefulness and isolation of its landscape. Humorous, dark, and sometimes tragic, Guilbeault's fourteen stories wink at each other, bringing the reader into a larger narrative, one that brushes against the themes of loss; of love; of coming of age.

Auto-fictive in essence, Guilbeault's writings press on memory's core, a place where imagination and truths mingle.

praise

"Nathalie Guilbeault’s Cold Chaos is a beautifully written collection of stories that explore memory, identity, and life in the North. With vivid and honest storytelling, Guilbeault brings readers into harsh and deeply moving landscapes. The mix of personal reflection and fiction makes each story feel real and immersive. Thoughtful and quietly powerful, Cold Chaos is a book that stays with you long after you finish reading."

—Samantha Olsen, Chicago Book Review

"Nathalie Guilbeault’s short story collection Cold Chaos is an exquisite testimony to how powerful the short form can be in the right hands. These fourteen interconnected stories, revolving around a protagonist (Adeline) residing in northern Quebec, are some of the most consistently readable and engaging prose I’ve come across. There is not a single dud in this fourteen-round chamber. No skippable tracks. Every story has the feel of a much larger story, and together they form like Voltron to create something much bigger. And that’s the genius of this collection. Each piece is executed with such scalpeled precision. They go down so smoothly and quickly but contain so much. At the end of each story, before continuing to the next, I needed to take a minute (sometimes more, often much more) to ponder how, exactly, Guilbeault had achieved such a readable, vivid, and emotionally complex experience with so few words. It’s something I’m still trying to dissect.

Most of these stories take place in northern Quebec, and you can feel it. Like, in your bones. Think: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. But it’s much more than just an ever-present environmental chill. There is the sense within this collection of an inner shudder, a kind of atomic emotional vibration creating its own heat, holding everything together by never quite solidifying in one spot. A vulnerability to these stories that is open, warm, and enveloping juxtaposed against the inevitable deepfreeze benefits of situational compartmentalization. The latter is possibly best illustrated in a beautiful passage from the title story: “Time had gone. / Time had come to leave everything behind. To leave the density of all her memories inside a ground that would hold them forever, inside its cold. A cold that prevents the rot from invading matters that matter.” Read that again. These four sentences are not the acme, but the baseline of prose here. This is the kind of care that Guilbeault brings to each line, each story, and the overarching concept of the entire collection.

If you are a fan of fiction or memoir or the in between, this collection will blow your mind. If you are a fan of short story collections or autofiction (or both) this will end up in your top ten. If you know the glow of authors like Amy Hempel, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Joy Williams, Elizabeth Ellen, Denis Johnson, Margaret Malone, and Rita Bullwinkel (to name a few) you will not be disappointed. Nathalie Guilbeault is a reader’s writer and a writer’s writer and an incredibly gifted storyteller. I can’t wait to read the novels she has already written, and I am eager to see what she produces next."

—Jason Arias, author