George McWhirter grounds his delightful characters in the real, while his sharp wit and creative scenarios border on the fantastical: a woman adopts a dolphin-man; an Irish madam runs a railroad bordello in the desert; a devoted husband drives his childless, belly-dancing wife to Greek tavernas with the ambition to quicken their lagging fertility; a Kurdish barber has a cure for hair loss, but not the loss of his wife and family in Iraq; a Mexican campesino swears his machete-severed ear is a sea shell tuned to the Pacific Ocean. The Gift of Women is about religion and sexuality, the surreal and the magical, a tale-telling of earthy and incendiary women, capable of setting a man, a valley, and an entire island on fire.

George McWhirter is the author of 10 books of poetry, eight books of short and long fiction, and four books of translation. He is the recipient of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the F. R. Scott Translation Prize and served as the inaugural Poet Laureate of Vancouver. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.