Books and Authors – 2013
Photos by Stuart Blower Photography
Tickets $15 (includes refreshments). Tickets from Blue Heron Books or at the door.
| Last Year’s Authors
Vincent Lam Dr. Lam’s first book, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, won the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and has recently been adapted for television and broadcast on HBO Canada. Dr. Lam co-authored The Flu Pandemic And You, a non-fiction guide to influenza pandemics. Percival Chen is the headmaster of the most respected English school in Saigon. He is also a bon vivant, a compulsive gambler and an incorrigible womanizer. He is well accustomed to bribing forever changing lists of government officials in order to maintain the elite status of the Chen Academy. He is fiercely proud of his Chinese heritage, and quick to spot the business opportunities rife in a divided country. He devotedly ignores all news of the fighting that swirls around him, choosing instead to read the faces of his opponents at high-stakes mahjong tables. But when his only son gets in trouble with the Vietnamese authorities, Percival faces the limits of his connections and wealth and is forced to send him away. In the loneliness that follows, Percival finds solace in Jacqueline, a beautiful woman of mixed French and Vietnamese heritage, and Laing Jai, a son born to them on the eve of the Tet offensive. Percival’s new-found happiness is precarious, and as the complexities of war encroach further and further into his world, he must confront the tragedy of all he has refused to see. |
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| Annabel Lyon Annabel Lyon’s story collection, Oxygen, and book of novellas, The Best Thing for You, were published in Canada to wide acclaim. The Golden Mean, her first novel, is a Canadian bestseller and is being published in six languages. It won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and the commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Lyon lives in British Columbia with her husband and two children.Pythias is her father’s daughter, with eyes his exact shade of unlovely, intelligent grey. A slave to his own curiosity and intellect, Aristotle has never been able to resist wit in another–even in a girl child who should be content with the kitchen, the loom and a life dictated by the womb. And oh his little Pytho is smart, able to best his own students in debate and match wits with a roomful of Athenian philosophers. Is she a freak or a harbinger of what women can really be? Pythias must suffer that argument, but she is also (mostly) secure in her father’s regard. But then Alexander dies a thousand miles from Athens, and sentiment turns against anyone associated with him, most especially his famous Macedonian-born teacher. Aristotle and his family are forced to flee to Chalcis, a garrison town. Ailing, mourning and broken in spirit, Aristotle soon dies. And his orphaned daughter, only 16, finds out that the world is a place of superstition, not logic, and that a girl can be played upon by gods and goddesses, as much as by grown men and women. To safely journey to a place in which she can be everything she truly is, Aristotle’s daughter will need every ounce of wit she possesses, but also grace and the capacity to love. |
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| C.S. Richardson CS RICHARDSON’s first novel, The End of the Alphabet, was an international bestseller published in thirteen countries and ten languages. Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (Canada & the Caribbean), it was named on four Best of the Year lists and was adapted for radio drama by BBC Radio 4. Richardson is also an accomplished and award-winning book designer. He lives and works in Toronto.Like his father before him, Octavio runs the Notre-Dame bakery, and knows the secret recipe for the perfect Parisian baguette. But, also like his father, Octavio has never mastered the art of reading and his only knowledge of the world beyond the bakery door comes from his own imagination. Just a few streets away, Isabeau works out of sight in the basement of the Louvre, trying to forget her disfigured beauty by losing herself in the paintings she restores and the stories she reads. The two might never have met, but for a curious chain of coincidences involving a mysterious traveller, an impoverished painter, a jaded bookseller, and a book of fairytales, lost and found . . . |
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| Miranda Hill MIRANDA HILL’s writing has been published by The New Quarterly, The Dalhousie Review and The Fiddlehead. She received her BA in drama from Queen’s University, and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Hill has worked in television and as a freelance writer and communications consultant. She is the founder and executive director of Project Bookmark Canada. She lives in Hamilton with her husband Lawrence Hill. Sleeping Funny is her first book of fiction.Sleeping Funny is that rare book–a debut that introduces us to a fully mature writer, one who instantly draws you in with her lean style, empathy and wit, and keeps you reading, with growing admiration and delight, from first page to last. These stories showcase Miranda Hill’s astonishing range and virtuosity, introducing us to a protean variety of characters, each as well-realized as the next. Here is a writer who can seamlessly inhabit the consciousness of a sixteen-year-old navigating an embarrassing sex-ed class, a middle-aged minister experiencing a devastating crisis of faith in a 19th century rural village, a pilot’s widow coping with her grief by growing an unusual “victory garden” during World War II, and well-heeled modern professional women juggling jobs, kids, and husbands, and trying to cope with the arrival of a beautiful bohemian neighbour, on a gentrified street in downtown Toronto. The qualities that unite these remarkable stories are a pervasive sense of mystery and magic, a wonderful wit and sophistication, and most surprisingly, the slight disorientation implied by the title: In Miranda Hill’s beguiling universe, the “real world” is recognizable and slightly askew, as if you were experiencing one of those strange dreams where you think you are awake–or as if you’ve been “sleeping funny” and are on the cusp of waking into the everyday world you thought you knew. |
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