Frances Peck’s debut novel, The Broken Places, centres around the thing that all of us in the Pacific Northwest don’t want to think about, but that haunts and fascinates us. The Big One. The earthquake we’ve been anticipating for as long as I can remember. This book takes place in wealthy West Vancouver, possibly because the devastation of the obscenely rich wouldn’t be quite so upsetting to readers. The narration is broken, rotating between six characters: Joe, a landscaper from Newfoundland; Kyle, his body-obsessed, philandering, cosmetic surgeon partner; Anna, a Ukranian immigrant who acts as nurse for Miss Dodie, a rich woman suffering from dementia; and the Stedmans—Charlotte and Tayne, both workaholic, grossly rich Type-As, and their overlooked daughter, Sidney; all of whose lives end up intermingling due to the earthquake.

Each of these characters is unique and sympathetic … for the most part, with fully developed backstories. They are all stuck in their lives in some way, all in need of a shake-up, which, unsurprisingly, the earthquake provides. What I loved about this book is that the characters do not play second fiddle to the earthquake. They—their stories, their struggles—are what kept me hooked, and the earthquake only served as a catalyst for their growth. A little way into the story, we’re introduced to a character named Summer Rain through a series of interviews at the ends of the chapters. These sections are intriguing, serving as a bit of foreshadowing, giving us crumbs of information as to how things turned out after the disaster. I really love that Peck added this element, which served to slowly show the reader not only the physical outcomes but the emotional arc of the characters beyond the end of the book. This book is about a physical disaster, yes, but more so the disasters we can create for ourselves and those around us when we lose sight of what matters.

Why I wrote The Broken Places

by Frances Peck

There are two reasons I wrote this novel.

The first reason was that an idea landed and wouldn’t leave. I was hiking in the mountains above Vancouver one day, alone, when I had this thought. What if a major earthquake hit right now? Would I feel it, up here in the mountains? Would I be injured? How would I get home, and would home even be there? What about my husband, my in-laws, my friends?

For weeks, the idea haunted me. I kept imagining a person stranded in the mountains, overlooking the city as it folded in on itself. That someone became Kyle, one of the main characters of The Broken Places. He’s a cosmetic surgeon, driven and insecure, a gay man—nothing like me except that he inhabits the space, geographical and emotional, that I kept envisioning.

The other characters in the novel grew around Kyle: his partner, Joe, a landscaper; the high-tech tycoon whose waterfront property Joe is servicing when the quake hits; the tycoon’s wife and teenage daughter; and the elderly woman and her caregiver, a Ukrainian refugee, who shelter in the tycoon’s mansion. Before I knew it, I had a story not only of disaster and survival but of privilege and marginalization, love and betrayal, identity and resilience.

The second reason I wrote the novel was business. While I was drafting early sections of the earthquake book, as I called it, my agent was shopping around my first novel. Publishers’ replies were thrilling. They praised the page-turning story, the powerful writing, the complex characters. And they all turned the book down.

“Finish the second novel,” my agent said, “and I’ll submit it while the publishers are still keen.” So I did. I wrote in every crevice of time the days provided, and I revised, and I revised again.

Eventually it happened—six years later, after a twisty series of events, signposted with rejections, not with any of the publishers that had loved and rejected the first novel, and in fact with a different agent. But at last The Broken Places went from an idea that had sunk its claws into me to a book the world could read.

Frances Peck built a career as an editor, ghostwriter, and educator before returning to her first love, writing fiction. The Broken Places (NeWest Press), her debut novel about a devastating earthquake hitting Vancouver, was named a best book of 2022 by the Globe and Mail. Her second novel, Uncontrolled Flight, comes out with NeWest Press in September 2023.