Description

Longlisted for the 2023-2024 Gordon Burn Prize
Longlisted for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize
Winner of the 2019 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Prose in English

Fact can be as strange as fiction. It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous. In the end, there may be no difference between them. An Inuk girl grows up in Nunavut, Canada, in the 1970s. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents’ love. She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw, amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol, and violence at the hands of those she should be able to trust. She sees the spirits that surround her, and the immense power that dwarfs all of us.

When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this.

In this acclaimed debut novel – haunting, brooding, exhilarating, and tender all at once – Tanya Tagaq explores the grittiest features of a small Arctic town and the electrifying proximity of the worlds of animals and of myth.

Publisher Review

'Tagaq's surreal meld of poetry and prose transmutes the Arctic's boundless beauty, intensity, and desolation into a wrenching contemporary mythology.' The New Yorker ---- 'Though the protagonist's coming-of-age story, generously and lovingly documented by Tagaq, is the anchor, Split Tooth is not a book that can be fully absorbed in one sitting. It's possible to sink deeper and deeper into the narrative with each successive reading. Like a smirking teenager, Split Tooth blithely gives typical literary expectations the finger, daring us to see and experience narrative as chaotic, emotional, and deeply instinctive. And it succeeds.' Quill and Quire ---- 'A raw, powerful voice breathes fresh air into traditional Inuit folklore to create a modern tale of mythological proportions.' Kirkus ---- '[Split Tooth] straddles the line between memoir and fiction, prose and poetry, magic and harsh reality. . . [and] is infused with Tagaq's intimate knowledge of life in the Arctic.' Oprah Magazine ---- '[A] forceful coming-of-age tale.' Toronto Life magazine ---- 'In [Tanya Tagaq]'s forthcoming novel, Split Tooth, there's a chapter called "Ritual" that is such a distillation of childhood magic and refuge that it made me feel like I was reading Tove Jansson or Roald Dahl for the first time.' Sean Michaels ---- 'Tanya Tagaq has written a book that should re-arrange the reader's mind and very being in her astounding Split Tooth. She uses the narrative arc of a coming of age story to tell of coming of age in a northern, indigenous community that includes close experience of abuse, village violence, colonial exploitation, and also close kin ties, birth, death, a knowing of how we are really fed, an awareness of how small life can be, and how large ... I look forward to putting this book in people's hands.' Rick Simonson, owner of Elliott Bay Book Company ---- 'In simplest terms, Split Tooth is a punch to the throat...a stellar first novel; an incredible work of Canadian, indigenous, and world literatures.' PopMatters ---- 'Tagaq has broken a new trail for all future Inuit writers to tread upon, describing the lived world of an Inuk child with writing that is breathtaking and singular...With this work Tagaq has reshaped what Inuit literature is... it is impossible to stop reading. It is delicious. And offers a new way forward for Inuit authors.' Inuit Art Quarterly