Local Hamilton authors Brent van Staalduinen and John Terpstra converged on the Redeemer campus last week as they both launched new books.

On Thursday, November 24th, a crowd gathered in the executive dining hall to hear each author share excerpts from their books and talk about the meaning behind their writing. The authors also sat down to sign personalized copies.

Van Staalduinen, who graduated with an honours degree in English from Redeemer in 2001, celebrated his debut novel hitting shelves. Entitled Saints, Unexpected, the story follows fifteen-year-old Mutton, who is robbed at gunpoint while working in her mother’s thrift store. Mutton and her family are thrown into a summer of remarkable and heartbreaking events. Van Staalduinen dubs the genre loosely as “urban magical realism”, and seems to have drawn inspiration from his hometown, as the story is set in Hamilton, Ontario.

John Terpstra’s book is on the other side of the literary coin. In the Company of All: Prayers from Sunday Mornings at St Cuthbert’s is a book of prayers that verges on poetry. The collection was written for Sunday morning church services at St Cuthbert’s Presbyterian Church in Hamilton, where Terpstra regularly attends. Following Terpstra’s distinctive rhetorical manner, In the Company of All deals with all kinds of human issues that arise in the course of living out the gospel today.