Couples who eschew traditional notions of living together, or Living Apart Together couples (LAT), are the subject of a book co-authored by Dianne Gillespie and Linda Breault.

Living Apart Together: A New Possibility for Loving Couples (Friesen Press, 2013) offers a collection of candid stories about LAT couples. How can couples keep romance alive? How can they sustain both independence and togetherness? Is it possible to be a couple but not live together?

Living Apart Together documents couples who nourish committed relationships without living together. Couples of all ages can maintain their own physical space and yet develop strong bonds. The book offers tales of couples who have created both happiness and independence in their lives.

Gillespie's novel, Wildwoods Child, follows rookie RCMP constable Nora Macpherson on her first assignment to Moose Forks, a ranching and logging community tucked into a wilderness landscape of snow-capped mountains, dense coniferous forests and glacial lakes and rivers. As one of the first-ever female Mounties, Nora must contend with the biases of some of her male colleagues as well as the social isolation of being a law enforcement officer in a small town. She befriends a young teacher, Abby Clarke, whose problem student, Tess Talbot, involves them in a search for answers to an old puzzle. Solving this mystery awakens Nora to the realization that there are many other unsolved disappearances haunting the north country.

Dianne Gillespie grew up in Ontario and the Prairies. She met Linda Breault while teaching in China after retiring from over thirty years of teaching English in B.C.'s public schools system. Gillespie is currently working on a fictional series about missing and murdered indigenous women.

Linda Breault has worked, lived and loved in Africa, Latin America, New Zealand, Central Asia and China where she crossed cultural, geographic and language borders. During her years working overseas she met several couples and individuals who were in LAT relationships.

BOOKS:

Living Apart Together: A New Possibility for Loving Couples (with Linda Breault)(Friesen Press, 2013) 978-1-4602-2378-9.

Wildwoods Child (CreateSpace, 2016) 978-1522957-45-4.

[BCBW 2016]