Winner of the Book Design Award at the 2018 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!

Karen Hofmann’s empathetic and cathartic novel, What is Going to Happen Next, pieces together the lives of five members of the Lund family following their enforced dispersal after the death of the father and the hospitalization of the mother in the remote West Coast community of Butterfly Lake. It explores their self-doubts and aspirations in the ways they cope with their separation and reunion through their work and personal relationships, and reveals the ways in which their past is filtered through memory and desire. It also skillfully exposes a Vancouver class system from the perspectives of diverse socio-economic conditions and lifestyles.

What is Going to Happen Next is character-driven and well-wrought, with a tenderness that propels the reader forward alongside the Lunds who are learning to fuse together as a chosen family.

Karen Hofmann grew up in the Okanagan Valley and taught creative writing at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, for many years. She now divides her time between Vancouver Island and the BC Interior. A first collection of poetry, Water Strider, was published by Frontenac House in 2008 and shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Prize. Her first novel, After Alice, was published by NeWest Press in 2014, and a second novel, What is Going to Happen Next, in 2017. Her short fiction has won the Okanagan Fiction Contest three times, and "The Burgess Shale" was shortlisted at the 2012 CBC Short Fiction Contest. Karen Hofmann is an avid walker, and her writing explores the landscapes, both rural and urban, of British Columbia as well as the personalities and social dynamics of the inhabitants. Her latest novel, A Brief View from the Coastal Suite, was released in spring 2021.

www.karenhofmann.com

Karen Hofmann's profile page

• Winner, Best Book Design at the Alberta Book Publishing Awards

Praise for What is Going to Happen Next:
"An incisive and deeply satisfying novel about the muscle memory of the human heart."
~ Sarah Mian, author of When the Saints
“Karen Hofmann’s What is Going to Happen Next is not another gloomy Can-Lit family saga but a familiar portrait of our neighbours and friends—maybe of ourselves—weathering the effects of far distant adversity with the same halting, human grace we all share.”
~ Jennifer Quist, author of Sistering
“A compassionate and insightful novel about siblings and the bonds they forge. Hofmann interweaves their stories with assurance, rich detail, and heart.”
~ Alice Zorn, author of Five Roses
"It’s a novel that’s as original as it is ambitious, and it works, resulting in an all-engrossing visceral reading experience, and I’m recommending it to everyone."
~ Kerry Clare, Pickle Me This
"As a family saga, the novel is empathetic, compassionate, and expertly paced.”
~ Brenda Johnston, Canadian Literature