Praise for Suddenly Light :
"Dunic's characters are all different sorts, at all different stages of life, dealing with tragedies, indignities, and other wild cards that cause them to lose their footing. [. . .] all the pieces are beautifully etched thanks to Dunic's flair for the power-packed chiseled sentence. As the widow from whose perspective the story Youth' is told thinks about the teenagers she has taken to observing, There was something pure about them, like elements. . .hot and bright or dark and cold, sparking off each other, reactive and explosive.' These stories give literary realism a good name." - Kirkus Reviews
"Dunic introduces us to some truly remarkable characters in this thoughtful collection of short stories showing how awkward and tenuous real human connection can be. In Suddenly Light, we meet characters who feel like people we see every day who are placed in unexpected situations: overnight security guards at a shopping mall and the interloper they find, a high school student who discovers a familiar-looking n1an frozen in the park, a pair of roommates who enjoy spying on the frequently naked woman across the street, a pet groomer who haltingly befriends a neighbourhood character. Dunic's stories are neatly constructed, subtle but capable of delivering an out-of-nowhere emotional punch that has the ring of truth. It's a book full of pleasant surprises and uncomfortable revelations." - Apple Books
"[Dunic's] stories radiate with the quiet beauty of everyday life . . . None of these stories are formulaic. [. . .] Like the narrator of Awake,' an insomniac who spends her time thinking about people that never thought about me,' Dunic examines the lives of the exiled, constructing histories of disappearing moments' from fragments." - Literary Review of Canada
"Dunic places her reader in the position of voyeur, watching from a distance and forced to make connections that aren't necessarily drawn explicitly. In I Didn't See Any Children with Balloons,' the narrator befriends an elderly woman who uses a walker and sits out front of a park handing balloons out to random children. When the narrator descends on a local hospital trying to find the old woman, a doctor is confused by the reason the narrator is there. The last line of the story, Why did you come here?,' has an unspoken answer, and it is the story's title. These, Dunic seems to suggest, are the kind of connections we risk missing if we don't pay sufficient attention. They are also the engine that gives Suddenly Light its quiet but surprisingly potent power." - Steven W. Beattie, That Shakespearean Rag
"The stories and characters in Dunic's collection offer great psychological depth and detail. These are stories of loneliness, isolation and despair, with characters who struggle to connect, to find meaning and to move forward." - Winnipeg Free Press
" Suddenly Light brings together fifteen quiet stories that I savored this fall, like delicacies, over an equal number of elongating nights - and then wished for fifteen more. These quiet stories are so perfectly immersive, so sensitively paced, and so gorgeous in their detail that they banished the desperate noise of the daily news cycle and reminded me that other ways of being are possible. In Dunic's hands, even a dull dinner party becomes an occasion for renewal as the narrator discovers her missing aliveness in mundane conversation with others." - Diane Josefowicz, Necessary Fiction
Praise for The Clarion :
"A novel of small, graceful moments of epiphany, fleeting happenstance connections, like the plaintive sound of a trumpet in the dark. A wonderful, and promising, debut." - Toronto Star
"[An] entrancing debut novel. . ." - The Globe and Mail
"Dunic's gentle prose, attentiveness and keen attention to detail is evident throughout this quiet and melancholy narrative, both in its few-and-far-between moments of not-quite happiness and acceptance and in its much more frequent moments of longing and despair. It is easy to see why [her] writing has been so well received and so well judged across the country, and it is exciting to imagine who and what she will create in the years to come." - Sharon Chisvin, Winnipeg Free Press
"With her beautiful debut novel, Nina Dunic takes a clear-eyed look at the ways we try to fool ourselves. Siblings Stasi and Peter shared a difficult and disjointed childhood, but they've taken divergent paths as adults. Stasi, a restless and driven wife, mother, and not-quite executive, strives to make the world bend to her will, while Peter, a would-be professional trumpet player, bends for everything and everyone all too easily. Alternating between her two protagonists' points of view, Dunic gives us heartbreaking insight into the inner monologues that nag at both characters as they each try to skirt past the deeper issues that are too painful to acknowledge. Both tragic and relatable, The Clarion is an intimate portrait of two people who are keenly aware of their flaws, even if they don't have the courage to confront them." - Apple Books
