Closing Ceremonies: Tales of Abandonment, Betrayal, and Consequences and Dying Times
Twelve stories connected through the life of Francesca, Closing Ceremonies: Tales of Abandonment, Betrayal, and Consequences and Dying Times (Guernica Editions, 2026) immerses the reader in the intimate terrain of domestic life and the emotional wreckage left in the aftermath of love.
Reviewers have evoked comparisons to the writings of Alice Munro, and Madott similarly situates her readers directly within the lives of characters whose seemingly ordinary circumstances become extraordinary through close observation and intimacy of entering into the middle of their lives. As Randall Perry remarks in the collection’s introduction, these are “captivating tales of women and men in everyday situations made extraordinary through meticulous and assured telling.”
The twelve stories accumulate into something larger than a series of individual narratives, with each story layering upon the last to trace Francesca’s progression through the formative experiences of coming-of-age, love, betrayal and abandonment. Through Francesca’s forging and breaking of relationships, Madott returns repeatedly to an elemental human yearning, the struggle to move beyond obsessive attachment toward a more selfless understanding of love.
Closing Ceremonies is ultimately concerned with what remains after emotional wreckage. The fragments of a life broken apart and the painful, imperfect process through which those fragments might be fused together again. Genuine connection is not simply found, but is painstakingly regrown in the aftermath of loss.
A collection of stories of emotional force, Madott’s characters inhabit spaces of instability. Shaken ground where emotion and dark humour can coalesce in a ‘verde’ human experience of ripening. Writing that has been deemed by other reviewers as ‘sharp and taut,’ as well as ‘intense and uncompromising,’ there is precision in the execution of these vignettes of domestic-noir.
Darlene Madott is an award-winning Toronto writer and former lawyer whose literary career has developed alongside more than three decades of legal practice. After being called to the Ontario Bar in 1985, Madott worked as a civil and matrimonial litigator before moving into collaborative law, mediation, and peacemaking. She retired from legal practice in 2020 to devote herself more fully to writing. Her fiction draws upon the tensions of relationships, loss and the complicated negotiations of ordinary life. She has authored ten books, including Song and Silence (1977), Bottled Roses (1985), Mazilli’s Shoes (1999), Joy, Joy, Why Do I Sing? (2004), Making Olives and Other Family Secrets(2008; revised as Making Olives and Other Family Secrets: Ripasso (2014)), Stations of the Heart (2012), Dying Times(2021), Winners and Losers: Tales of Life, Law, Love and Loss (2023), and the more recent Closing Ceremonies, which incorporates Dying Times.
Madott’s short fiction has been widely anthologized and recognized with two Bressani Literary Awards, while she has also been shortlisted three times for the Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Award and recognized in Accenti Magazine competitions. Her 2023 collection Winners and Losers grew directly from her legal career, transforming the professional world of litigation into linked stories concerned with law, love, loss, marriage, motherhood and the search for truth. The collection was named among The Miramichi Reader’s Best Books of 2023 in Short Fiction. Her work has also travelled beyond Canada, with translations into Italian and participation in international literary conferences, including a 2025 conference on the short story in English in Killarney, Ireland.
Guernica Editions is an especially fitting home for Closing Ceremonies as a collection that turns the aftermath of love into a study of grief and reconciliation. Founded in Montreal in 1978 by Antonio D’Alfonso, Guernica was established with an explicit commitment to social justice, cultural exchange and literature that crosses borders. Its guiding philosophy remains ‘No Borders, No Limits,’ with the press seeking books that are self-aware and willing to challenge literary and cultural boundaries. Madott’s linked stories inhabit that same territory of complication, refusing the neat divisions between love and loss. In bringing together Closing Ceremonies with Madott’s earlier Dying Times, Guernica also allows the collection to become something larger than a series of stories about endings. This collection of short stories becomes an examination of what remains after the ending and how fiction might transform the debris of love into another form of understanding.
Thank you to Darlene Madott, Guernica Editions and River Street Writing for a complimentary copy in request for an honest review.
