Catherine Hernandez

Catherine Hernandez is a proud queer woman of colour and an award-winning author. She is of Filipino, Spanish, Chinese, and Indian heritage and is married into the Navajo Nation. Her debut novel, Scarborough, which was adapted into an award-winning motion picture, won the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award as an unpublished manuscript. It was a finalist for the Toronto Book Award, the Forest of Reading Evergreen Award, the Edmund White Award, the Trillium Book Award, and Canada Reads. Her second novel, Crosshairs, made the CBC’s Best Canadian Fiction list and was named one of NOW magazine’s 10 Best Books, an Audible Best Audiobook and an NBC 20 Best LGBTQ Book. Her most recent novel, The Story of Us, was shortlisted for the Forest of Reading Evergreen Award and longlisted for a Toronto Book Award. Catherine Hernandez is also a playwright and the author of the children’s books M Is for Mustache: A Pride ABC Book, I Promise and Where Do Your Feelings Live? She lives outside Toronto.

Website: catherinehernandezcreates.com
Instagram: @legshernandez
Facebook: @catherinehernandezcreates

FESTIVAL BOOK

Behind You

As terror grips a city, a young girl faces danger closer to home and chilling memories that last a lifetime.

Catherine Hernandez’s most gripping and affecting novel yet, Behind You, is inspired by a horrifying chapter in Canadian history and follows fictional characters terrorized by a fictional perpetrator.

Alma is a Filipina woman who works as a film editor for a cheesy true crime series featuring the most notorious killers of the 20th century called Infamous. On the surface she seems to live a good life with her wife Nira and teenage son, Mateo. But there is so much left unsaid.

It’s not until Infamous‘ last episode features the Scarborough Stalker that she remembers coming of age while the serial rapist and killer was attacking women and girls in Scarborough in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

What unfolds are two storylines: In the past, young Alma watches an entire city become consumed with a manhunt for an elusive, terrifying suspect, while she herself is in jeopardy from closer corners. In the present, adult Alma must come to terms with her own ideas of consent to stop her son’s dangerous behaviour towards his girlfriend.

Weaving back and forth in time, Behind You is a moving story of one girl’s resilience into adulthood and a chilling portrayal of the insidiousness of rape culture. It daringly turns the Whodunit genre on its head by asking the question “Who hasn’t done it?” As in, who has not been complicit in sexual harm?

GET THE BOOK

Owl’s Nest Books | Calgary Public Library | Audio

BE CURIOUSER

• Review: Behind You. –Quill & Quire
• Catherine Hernandez’s The Story of Us explores the hopefulness of human connection. –The Globe and Mail
• Catherine Hernandez’s latest novel Behind You optioned for film and television. –CBC Books