It is rare that a novel by a relatively unknown writer published by a boutique literary press receives national attention. Add the fact that the press is in its first year of operation, and the odds are decidedly stacked against it. Yet Marina Endicott crafted a novel — Good to a Fault — that demands to be noticed.

Despite the odds, this demand has not gone unheeded. On October 7, the Scotiabank Giller Prize jury shortlisted five authors which included Endicott. It was an even greater honour than the long list, which had taken her by surprise. “It would never have occurred to me to look for that list,” she says with a laugh. “I think the book is really good, but I was not expecting to make that list.”

The novel, her second, is the only one on that prestigious list that is published by a small literary press — Calgary’s newly minted Freehand Books. Endicott, modest in the face of praise, appears more pleased with the effect this recognition will have on the press. “For a small publisher, for a small literary press in its first year of operation, it’s really important that the press gets this kind of boost and I’m delighted that the book is helping with that,” she says.

Working on the book for seven years, while the writer-in-residence at the Nan Boothby Memorial Library in Cochrane, Endicott managed to create a novel bursting with an insider’s understanding of grief and change. Good to a Fault follows the slow, fuzzy waves of grief and the altered lives of the characters in the midst of tragedy. One event — a car accident — spirals into a series of disasters and blessings that force the characters’ long-festering psychological wounds to open and demand attention.

It is a tale born of real-life experience with loss. Paul Tippett, an Anglican priest and central character in the novel, explains in a sermon that: “It’s hard to live with the constant understanding of death in the forefront of our minds. Scholars of old kept a skull on their writing desks to help. The reminder of imminent death, memento mori, is one of the greatest spurs we have to right action.”

For Endicott, that spur to right action came from her sister. “I had a very beautiful skull on my desk,” she says, referring to Tippet’s sermon. “My younger sister had died of cancer the year before I started working on the book. So, of course, that was a great source of increased understanding of what people go through.”

Endicott focuses on the struggles of life in her writing, to showcase how people deal with challenges and rise up or sink down when faced with changing circumstances. “Those contradictions of really tragic, wonderful, awful things all smashed up together, I really like those in books and in life,” she explains.

Her first novel, Open Arms, which will be re-issued by Freehand in the spring, examines the lives of two women and their daughters moving in together. The children are both the offspring of a womanizing, free-living poet on the West Coast. Endicott is currently working on a new book that will follow three sisters touring Vaudeville shows on the Prairies in 1909.

Endicott was not always a novelist — having worked in theatre for a number of years — and is still acclimatizing to the long stretches of time between initiation and completion of a project. “The hardest work, really, is sustaining,” she says. “You know it’s such a long process to get a novel finished, you have to fight to maintain your belief and your confidence in the project. Working in the theatre, I was used to pretty immediate gratification, and instant response from people.”

Endicott’s desire for that instant response was fed throughout the writing of Good to a Fault by her role as writer-in-residence at the Nan Boothby library, where she read sections of the book to the public and gauged their reaction. Since August she has been teaching creative writing at the University of Alberta, which also helps her continual growth as a writer. “It forces you to articulate what you think about writing,” she says.

With all the attention Good to a Fault has received, it appears Endicott’s process is working. So how does she feel about the possibility of a Giller Prize looming over her? “I’m trying to keep it out of my mind,” she says. “I’m trying to tell myself there’s nothing I can do in wishing or thinking that will affect the outcome, but it will be very interesting to see what happens that day. It’s a fantastic list, and it’s just an honour to be on it.”