All the Shining People

In a dozen loosely connected short stories, [Kathy Friedman] weaves a colourful and rich tapestry of the community — and does so masterfully … While the individual tales shine on their own, each is enriched by the ones that follow, forming a beautiful constellation of work.

Kathy Friedman takes a stirring, up-close look at where our many identities intersect in this short-story collection … Deeply moving.

A cubist collage in transition which captures the dynamics of contemporary Jewish Diaspora … Betwixt and between, neither here nor there, Friedman’s characters shine through Kafka’s shadows, liminal migration, and the contrapposti of linked short stories.

In these refined, sophisticated stories, characters mingle and interact, sometimes aware of one another, sometimes not. All the Shining People, like real life, often takes you places you absolutely didn’t expect to go.

In these nuanced and inventive stories of connection, identity, disappointment, and love, Friedman explores how we find ourselves in history, living our particular cultural narratives with all their charm, difficulty, and contradiction. With compassion, insight and understanding, she asks, how — living in the diaspora of self — can we find our way home? What is it to be emigrants from our own lives, and how can we find our place? Ultimately, what is it to have a relationship with self, culture, place, and people? All the Shining People finds the universal in the local, and it shines.

A smart and adventurous collection of stories that makes visible the South African Jewish diaspora in Toronto. Reminiscent of David Bezmozgis’s Natasha and Other Stories, Friedman’s characters are vivid, desperate, and self-aware. She writes them beautifully. These are subtle stories that simultaneously make the world feel large.

Remarkable in its scope and its multiplicity of voices, All the Shining People is a dazzling debut from an immensely talented writer. With astonishing compassion and insight, Kathy Friedman has conceived a cast of characters so real they leap off the page. These exquisite stories reveal the fragilities of human connection and our desperate need for redemption. This is a stunningly assured collection that is at once fiercely political and intensely intimate, darkly comic, and devastating.

Powerful and haunting, Kathy Friedman’s characters leap off the page with their journey for belonging. In these stories, people search for connection in community, in their cities, and within their own families, while at the same time juggling the question: Where do I come from? Friedman’s sharp voice and keen attention to detail will reel you in and never let you go.

Kathy Friedman’s glowing narratives and polished prose thoroughly impress as they shift from South Africa to envelop the Don Valley. And her characters’ emotions — so elegantly spotlighted and revealed — truly leave their mark. Surprising, inventive, and delightfully connected, All the Shining People is a moving debut.

A stunning and masterful collection. I found myself torn between devouring the book in a single sitting and savouring slowly to prolong the magic. True to its name, these stories so beautifully capture the prismatic ways humans illuminate, whether through life-changing kindnesses like seeing those who feel invisible or the harsh light of having one’s flaws suddenly come into focus. In a pointillistic fashion, each story simultaneously offers a profound glimpse of the Jewish diaspora experience while contributing to larger themes like the inherent tension of trying to belong anywhere, both geographically and spiritually.