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June's Author of the Month: JOSEPH KANON

Tuesday, May 02, 2017 at 4:24pm

Joseph Kanon is the internationally bestselling author of seven novels, which have been published in twenty-four languages. They include Los Alamos (1997), which won the Edgar Award for best first novel; The Good German (2001), which was made into a film starring George Clooney and Cate Blanchett; Alibi (2005) which earned Kanon the Hammett Award of the International Association of Crime Writers; and Leaving Berlin (2014). Set in the early stages of the Cold War, his work is known for its rich, atmospheric details and well-drawn characters, all rendered in a distinctive, staccato prose.

His latest, Defectors, is a fast-paced novel about an American spy, the Cold War’s most notorious defector, who gives up his country for the safety of Moscow. In 1949, Frank Weeks, fair-haired boy of the newly formed CIA, is exposed as a Communist spy and seeks sanctuary behind the Iron Curtain. Now, twelve years later, he has written his memoirs, a KGB- approved project almost certain to be an international bestseller, and has asked his brother Simon, a publisher, to come to Moscow to edit the manuscript. It’s a reunion Simon both dreads and longs for. Defectors is the story of one family torn apart by divided loyalties, but it's also a revealing look at the wider community of defectors, American and British, who have escaped one prison only to find themselves trapped in another.

Categories: Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Author of the Month

May's Author of the Month: ELIZABETH STROUT

Tuesday, May 02, 2017 at 4:18pm

Despite growing up on a dirt road with no access to TV or newspapers, Elizabeth Strout was drawn to writing things down, and encouraged by her mother, she kept notebooks from an early age. Books were a miracle to her, and early on she knew she wanted to become a writer. She was in her forties, however, before her first book, the novel Amy & Isabelle, was published in 1998. Her third book, Olive Kitteridge, a collection of connected short stories won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Reverberating with the deep bonds of family and hope, her sixth book, a novel, Anything is Possible, explores the whole range of human emotion through the intimate dramas of a cast of small-town characters struggling to understand themselves and each other. A woman trades self-respect for a wealthy husband while in the pages of a book her sister finds a kindred spirit who changes her life; the janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help; a grown daughter longs for her mother's love even as she comes to accept her mother’s happiness in a foreign country; and the adult Lucy Barton (the heroine of Strout's My Name Is Lucy Barton), returns to visit her siblings after seventeen years of absence.

Categories: Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Author of the Month

April's Author of the Month: SHARON BUTALA

Wednesday, Mar 01, 2017 at 9:10pm

Born in Nipawin, Saskatchewan, Sharon Butala is a bestselling author of both fiction and nonfiction. A personal and spiritual exploration of the roots of creativity, her classic book The Perfection of the Morning (1994) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. Her latest novel, Wild Rose, was published in 2015 and has been shortlisted for the W.O. Mitchell Book Prize. Butala is a recipient of the Marian Engel Award, the Saskatchewan Order of Merit, and the 2012 Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence.

In the tradition of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Butala's new book, Where I Live Now, is profound in its understanding of the many homes women must build for themselves in a lifetime. When her husband, Peter, died unexpectedly, she found herself with no place to call home. Torn by grief and loss, she fled the ranchlands of southwest Saskatchewan and moved to the city. A lifetime of possessions was reduced to a few boxes of books, clothes, and keepsakes. Reinventing herself in an urban landscape was painful, and facing her new life as a widow tested her very being. Yet out of this hard-won new existence comes an astonishingly frank, compassionate and moving memoir that offers not only solace and hope but inspiration to those who endure profound loss. (Hardcover. $26.99. Simon & Schuster. April)

Winnipeg EVENT APRIL 11

Categories: Authors, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Author of the Month

March's Author of the Month: TIM COOK

Wednesday, Mar 01, 2017 at 8:55pm

Tim Cook is a historian at the Canadian War Museum (CWM), an Adjunct Research Professor at Carleton University, and a former director for Canada’s History Society. He is the author of several authoritative yet accessible award-winning books on Canadian military history in which he illuminates the inner lives of military men and women on the front lines. In 2012, he was awarded the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal for his contributions to Canadian history, and in 2013 he received the Governor General’s History Award for Popular Media: The Pierre Burton Award.

In his new book, Vimy, Cook returns to the First World War, the subject upon which he built his name, with books such as At the Sharp End and Shock Troops, winner of the RBC Taylor Prize. The Vimy battle that began April 9, 1917, was unlike any other battle in Canadian history. It was the first time the four divisions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force fought together. 10,600 men were killed or injured over four days. It has been described as the “birth of the nation.” But the meaning of that phrase has never been explored, nor has any writer — until now —explained why the battle continues to resonate with Canadians 150 years later. (Hardcover. $38.00. Allen Lane. March)

Categories: Authors, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Author of the Month

February's Author of the Month: HEATHER O'NEILL

Saturday, Dec 31, 2016 at 3:20pm

Heather O’Neill is a Canadian novelist, poet, short-story writer, screenwriter and essayist. Lullabies for Little Criminals, her debut novel, was published in 2006 to international critical acclaim and won Canada Reads. It was shortlisted for both the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Orange Prize for Fiction. She has since published the novel The Girl Who Was Saturday Night and the short story collection Daydreams of Angels, both of which were shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in consecutive years.

In her new novel,  The Lonely Hearts Hotel, two babies are abandoned in a Montreal orphanage in the winter of 1910. Before long, their true talents emerge: Pierrot is a piano prodigy; Rose lights up even the dreariest room with her dancing and comedy. As they travel around the city performing for the rich, the children fall in love with each other and dream up a plan for the most extraordinary and seductive circus show the world has ever seen.

The Lonely Hearts Hotel is a tale of charismatic pianos, invisible dance partners, radicalized chorus girls, drug-addicted musicians, brooding clowns, and an underworld whose fortune hinges on the price of a kiss. (Hardcover. $29.99. HarperCollins. February)

 E  Winnipeg Event Feb. 13 & Saskatoon Event Feb. 14

Categories: Authors, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Author of the Month
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