Lynn Coady is a Canadian from Nova Scotia, and the issues that she addresses in her work arise out of the clash between the provincial style of her native province (settled by Europeans since the early seventeenth century) and the urban values of metropolitan Canadian life (known in Nova Scotia as “aways”!). Regionalism has long been recognised as a feature of Canadian writing, and Canadian authors have—since the nineteenth century—set out to depict the reality of life in a vast country with distinctive regional cultures. Few, however, have made the earthiness, vulgarity, and vehemently non-cosmopolitan ethos of their imagined locale the central theme of that fiction. In the fiction of Lynn Coady, the suffocating effect of the culture represented is inseparable from its setting: the non-urban areas of the Maritime provinces with a decaying industrial base in mining, steel, shipbuilding, and other faltering endeavours. In Lynn Coady’s work, the stifling provincialism of small-town Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, or Prince Edward Island is created both as a bewilderingly limiting feature of the protagonists’ attempts to establish their own identities and codes of values, and also as the aggressively confident assertion of value-through-difference of many of the distinctively locals. Most of the characters talk in obscenities in a constant flow of distinctively regional vulgarity which not only represents a way of life but which is also seen by many as their distinguishing, rough-and-ready virtue.