The Panelists
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Perdita Felicien is defending Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald
Samantha Nutt is defending The Jade Peony by Wayson Choy
Roland Pemberton aka Cadence Weapon is defending Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland
Simi Sara is defending Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott
Michel Vézina is defending Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner, translated by Lazer Lederhendler
The Books
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fall on Your Knees (Paperback)Ann-Marie Macdonald
Fiction
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: August 26, 1997
Book Description
“What a wild ride — I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough,” Oprah Winfrey told her viewers as she announced Fall on Your Knees as her February 2002 Book Club selection. Set largely in a Cape Breton coal mining community called New Waterford, ranging through four generations, Ann-Marie MacDonald’s dark, insightful and hilarious first novel focuses on the Piper sisters and their troubled relationship with their father, James. Winner of the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, it was a national bestseller in Canada for two years, and it has been translated into 17 languages.
At the start of the 20th century, James Piper sets fire to his dead mother’s piano and heads out across Cape Breton Island to find a new place to live, eventually eloping with 13-year-old Materia Mahmoud, the daughter of wealthy, traditional Lebanese parents. And so, from early on, Ann-Marie MacDonald establishes some major themes: racial tension, isolation, passion and forbidden love, which will gradually lead to incest, death in childbirth, and even murder. At the centre of this epic story is the nature of family love, beginning with the Piper sister who depend on one another for survival. Their development as characters — beautiful Kathleen, the promising diva; saintly Mercedes; Frances, the mischievous bad girl, who tries to bear the family’s burden; and disabled Lily, everyone’s favourite — forms the heart of the novel. And then there is James, their flawed father.
Moving from Cape Breton Island to the battlefields of World War I, to Harlem in New York’s Jazz Age and the Depression, the tense and enthralling plot of Fall on Your Knees contains love, pain, death, joy, and triumph. The structure of the narrative is multi-faceted, richly layered, and shifts back and forth through time as it approaches the story from different angles, “giving it a mythic quality that allows dark, half buried secrets to be gracefully and chillingly revealed” (The New York Times Book Review). As the details of the labyrinthine plot are pulled together, the question of whether it is possible to escape one’s family history gradually raises itself.
The book’s epigraph, taken from Wuthering Heights, seems appropriate to a novel concerned with the different, often violent, forms that love can take. On the inexorable journey towards tragedy we encounter dark yet vivid images of neglect and violence, yet the novel radiates an unquenchable life-force, and yet the novel radiates an unquenchable life-force, shimmering with emotional depth, sensual with virtuoso descriptions of the power of music. It is a saga haunted by ghosts and saints, religious fanaticism and magic. MacDonald gives the most ordinary lives extraordinarily dramatic dimensions.
About the Author
Ann-Marie MacDonald was born in West Germany and spent the first few years of her life on a Canadian air force station near Baden Baden. Her father was an officer in the RCAF and the family was posted numerous times.
She attended one year at Carleton University, Ottawa, studying languages and Classics. She went to the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal where she trained as an actor, graduating from the program in 1980. She moved to Toronto where she began an acting career. She soon became involved in creating original Canadian work in a number of contexts: collective creation, collaboration and solo writing. The work always combined theatrical innovation, politics and entertainment. She worked as an independent artist, with Nightwood Theatre and Theatre Passe Muraille as her principal theatre “homes.” Her seminal works include the collective creation This is For You, Anna, and the multi-episodic Nancy Drew: Clue in the Fast Lane. Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) was MacDonald’s first solo-authored work.
She continued to work as an actor in theatres across the country and in many independent films, including I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, Where the Spirit Lives and Better Than Chocolate. As well, she guest-starred on numerous television series, most recently Made in Canada. MacDonald was last on stage in the spring of 2001 when she starred in a sold-out production of Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) at the Bluma Appel Theatre in Toronto. Currently, MacDonald is host of the CBC series Life and Times.
Her more recent work for theatre includes the play The Arab’s Mouth, the libretto for the chamber opera Nigredo Hotel, the collectively created The Attic, The Pearls and Three Fine Girls in which she also performed, and, most recently, the book and lyrics for the musical comedy Anything That Moves.
MacDonald’s work as an actor and writer has been honoured with a number of awards, including the Governor General’s Award, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Canadian Authors’ Association Award, the Dartmouth Award, the Gemini Award, the Chalmers Award and the Dora Mavor Moore Award.
Fall on Your Knees was MacDonald’s first novel and is available from Vintage Canada. She lives in Toronto with her partner, her daughter and two dogs.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Jade Peony(Paperback)Wayson Choy
Fiction / Literary
Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
Published: October 1, 1995
Book Description
"Beautifully written. . . . It renders a complex and complete human world, which by the end we have learned to love."
— The Boston Book Review
Chinatown, Vancouver, in the late 1930s and '40s provides the backdrop for this poignant first novel, told through the vivid reminiscences of the three younger children of an immigrant Chinese family. The siblings grapple with their individual identities in a changing world, wresting autonomy from the strictures of history, family, and poverty. Sister Jook-Liang dreams of becoming Shirley Temple and escaping the rigid, old ways of China. Adopted Second Brother Jung-Sum, struggling with his sexuality and the trauma of his childhood in China, finds his way through boxing. Third Brother Sekky, who never feels comfortable with the multitude of Chinese dialects swirling around him, becomes obsessed with war games, and learns a devastating lesson about what war really means when his 17-year-old babysitter dates a Japanese man.
Mingling with life in Canada and the horror of war are the magic, ghosts, and family secrets of Poh-Poh, or Grandmother, who is the heart and pillar of the family. Side by side, her three grandchildren survive hardships and heartbreaks with grit and humor. Like the jade peony of the title, Choy's storytelling is at once delicate, powerful, and lovely.
About the Author
Wayson Choy
Wayson Choy’s first novel, The Jade Peony, spent 26 weeks on the Globe and Mail’s bestseller list and won numerous awards. Other Press is reissuing The Jade Peony in February 2007. His bestselling memoir, Paper Shadows, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award. Wayson Choy lives in Toronto.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture(Paperback)Douglas Coupland
Fiction / Literary / Humorous
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: March 28, 1991
Book Description
Generation X is Douglas Coupland's acclaimed salute to the generation born in the late 1950s and 1960s — a generation known vaguely up to then as "twentysomething." Generation X has been Nominated for Canada Reads 2010! Click here for more information regarding Canada Reads. http://www.cbc.ca/canadareads/ Andy, Claire, and Dag, each in their twenties, have quit "pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause" in their respective hometowns and cut themselves adrift on the California desert. In search of the drastic changes that will lend meaning to their lives, they've mired themselves in the detritus of American cultural memory. Refugees from history, the three develop an ascetic regime of story-telling, boozing, and working McJobs — "low-pay, low-prestige, low-benefit, no-future jobs in the service industry." They create modern fables of love and death among the cosmetic surgery parlors and cocktail bars of Palm Springs, disturbingly funny tales of nuclear waste, historical overdosing, and mall culture. A dark snapshot of the trio's highly fortressed inner world quickly emerges — landscapes peopled with dead TV shows, "Elvis moments," and semi-disposable Swedish furniture. And from these landscapes, deeper portraits emerge, those of fanatically independent individuals, pathologically ambivalent about the future and brimming with unsatisfied longings for permanence, for love, and for their own home. Andy, Dag, and Claire are underemployed, overeducated, intensely private, and unpredictable. Like the group they mirror, they have nowhere to assuage their fears, and no culture to replace their anomie.
About the Author
Douglas Coupland was born on a NATO base in Germany in 1961. He is the author of the number-one international bestseller JPod and nine other novels including The Gum Thief, Hey Nostradamus!, All Families Are Psychotic and Generation X. His books have been translated into 35 languages and published in most countries around the world. He is also a visual artist and sculptor, furniture designer and screen-writer. He lives and works in Vancouver.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Good to a Fault (Paperback)Marina Endicott
Fiction
Publisher: Freehand Books
Published: July 1, 2009
Book Description
In a novel reminiscent of the work of Penelope Lively, Ann Tyler, and Alice Munro, acclaimed author Marina Endicott gives us one of the most satisfying, most profound, and most memorable reads of the year.
Absorbed in her own failings, Clara Purdy crashes her life into a sharp left turn, taking the young family in the other car along with her. When bruises on the mother, Lorraine, prove to be late-stage cancer, Clara—against all habit and comfort—moves the three children and their terrible grandmother into her own house.
We know what is good, but we don't do it. In Good to a Fault, Clara decides to give it a try, and then has to cope with the consequences: exhaustion, fury, hilarity, and unexpected love. But she must question her own motives. Is she acting out of true goodness, or out of guilt? Most shamefully, has she taken over simply because she wants the baby for her own?
What do we owe in this life, and what do we deserve? This compassionate, funny, and fiercely intelligent novel looks at life and death through grocery-store reading glasses: being good, being at fault, and finding some balance on the precipice.
About the Author
Marina Endicott was born in Golden, BC, and grew up in Nova Scotia and Toronto. She now lives in Edmonton and teaches creative writing at the University of Alberta.
Marina’s first novel, Open Arms, was nominated for the Amazon/Books In Canada First Novel award in 2002 and serialized on CBC Radio’s Between the Covers. Her stories have been featured in Coming Attractions and shortlisted for both the Journey Prize and the Western Magazine Awards. She’s had three plays produced and her long poem, The Policeman’s Wife, some letters, was shortlisted for the CBC Literary Awards in 2006. She is currently at work on a novel about the Belle Auroras, a sister-trio vaudeville act touring the Canadian prairies in 1909, as well as series of YA novels called Time in Hand.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nikolski : A Novel (Paperback)Lazer Lederhendler Nicolas Dickner
Fiction / Literary
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: May 12, 2009
Book Description
A sweet and quirky novel that follows three characters as they search for home while clinging to artifacts of their past: a misdirected compass, a book with no cover, and tales of piracy.
This is a story of three characters—Noah, Joyce, and the anonymous narrator—as each leave their far-flung birthplaces to follow their own personal songs of migration. All three end up in Montreal, each on his or her voyage of selfdiscovery, each compelled to deal with the mishaps of heartbreak and the twisted branches of their shared family tree. Filled with humor, charm, and marvelous storytelling, this novel links cartography, garbage-obsessed archeologists, pirates past and present, a mysterious book with no cover, and a broken compass whose needle obstinately points to the Aleutian village of Nikolski (a minuscule village inhabited by thirty-six people, five thousand sheep, and an indeterminate number of dogs). This is a sweet, well-told story about three characters
who break free from their families in order to live authentically.
About the Author
Nicolas Dickner won two literary awards for his first published
work, the short story collection L’encyclopedie du petit cercle. Born in
Riviere-du-Loup, Quebec, he traveled extensively in Europe and
Latin America before settling in Montreal. This is his first novel.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment