It’s 1964 in rural Ontario in Kelly Watt’s debut novel, Mad Dog, and 14-year-old Sheryl-Anne MacRae has a transistor playing the Supremes and a swoony crush on Peter Angelo, the guitar-playing hitchhiker working in her Uncle Fergus’s orchard for the summer. She also has the “sight,” the ability to see pictures of things in her head before they happen, or at least that’s how her uncle explains the horrible visions she has been having. The lazy adolescent curiosity of Sheryl’s summer of ‘64–reading Nancy Drew by the lake, aiming her binoculars at the lovely hired hand–is shadowed by a vague haze of cruelty and menace, which thickens the more we learn about Fergus’s apocalyptic ideas: that a new age is coming, and that “the true law is man’s will, what is evil often does good.”

The Ratfinks is a feminist novel about a group of women activists. The main character, Willie, struggles to come to terms with her horrific childhood in an orphanage, where she was tortured by a group of pedophiles. She hooks up with The Ratfinks, a group of women activists who travel to the U.N., lecture on human trafficking, and lobby to have non-state actor torture included in the criminal code. Willie begins traveling with The Ratfinks, thereby transforming her personal sorrow into public good will; her isolation into camaraderie and fellowship among women.

* Manuscript proposal available on request.