Touching Strangers

By: Stacey Madden

Narrated by: Cherlandra Estrada, Nate Drury

Length: 5 hrs and 58 mins

Publisher's summary

Aaron Cordic and Samantha Riske are a couple of 20-something hypochondriacs living in east-end Toronto. While Aaron works part-time at a bathroom supply store, donning surgical masks, plastic gloves, and a backpack full of sanitary products, Samantha hides herself away in their apartment, tip-toeing around naked and spying on the neighbours. Between paranoid trips to the doctor and extremely intimate examinations of each other's bodies, they’ve managed to eke out an isolated and highly sterilized existence.

Then, one day, birds begin falling from the sky as numerous tenants in their building become mysteriously ill. Before long, a pandemic known as Buzzard Flu has swept across the city, and Aaron and Samantha must come to terms with the all-too-real possibility that disease, or even death, could finally be at hand. But is Buzzard Flu the biggest problem the couple must face? Or does a more dangerous killer lurk closer to home.

By turns disturbing, uplifting, funny, and weirdly erotic, Touching Strangers examines what it means to be young and afraid in a world more hazardous than we want to believe.

©2017 Stacey Madden (P)2021 Now Or Never Publishing

Critic reviews

“Madden offers a rousing, weird, and darkly comic tale with a beating pulp fiction heart.” (Publishers Weekly)

“Madden’s writing, like the virus in this novel, is quick to infect the reader. His words get under your skin and worm their way to your heart and guts.” (J. Kent Messum, Arthur Ellis Award winning author of Bait)