Happy New Year! We are starting the year with some great reads! The Seniors Book Club will be meeting January 14, 2009 at 2:00p.m. in the Training Room to discuss the Giller award-winning novel Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay.About the book.....
Harry Boyd, a hard-bitten refugee from failure in Toronto television, has returned to a small radio station in the Canadian North. There, in Yellowknife, in the summer of 1975, he falls in love with a voice on air, though the real woman, Dido Paris, is both a surprise and even more than he imagined.
Dido and Harry are part of the cast of eccentric, utterly lovable characters, all transplants from elsewhere, who form an unlikely group at the station. Their loves and longings, their rivalries and entanglements, the stories of their pasts and what brought each of them to the North, form the centre. One summer, on a canoe trip four of them make into the Arctic wilderness they find the balance of love shifting, much as the balance of power in the North is being changed by the proposed Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline, which threatens to displace Native people from their land.
Written in gorgeous prose, laced with dark humour, Late Nights on Air is Hay’s most seductive and accomplished novel yet.
Review Quotes:
“Hay exposes the beauty simmering in the heart of harsh settings with an evocative grace that brings to mind Annie Proulx.”
— Washington Post
"Dazzling....A flawlessly crafted and timeless story, masterfully told.” — Jury citation, the Scotiabank Giller Prize
“Exquisite….Hay creates enormous spaces with few words, and makes the reader party to the journey, listening, marvelling….” — Globe and Mail
(Source: www.mcclelland.com)
The Monday Evening Book Club will be meeting Monday , January 12th at 7:00 p.m. in the Library Program Room to discuss the novel The Outlander by Gil Adamson. This book is a"Canada Reads" selection for 2009.More about this Canadian historical novel:
In 1903 a mysterious, desperate young woman flees alone across the west, one quick step ahead of the law. She has just become a widow by her own hand.
Gil Adamson's extraordinary novel opens in heart-pounding mid-flight and propels the reader through a gripping road trip with a twist -- the steely outlaw in this story is a grief-struck nineteen-year-old woman. As the young widow encounters characters of all stripes -- unsavoury, wheedling, greedy, lascivious, self-reliant, and occasionally generous and trustworthy -- Adamson weds her brilliant literary style to the gripping, moving, picaresque tale of one woman's deliberate journey into the wild.
Reviews:
"The Outlander deserves to be read twice, first for the plot and the complex characters which make this a page-turner of the highest order, and then a second time, slowly, to savor the marvel of Gil Adamson's writing. This novel is a true wonder."
- Ann Patchett
"Gil Adamson's first novel bolts off the opening page. . . An absorbing adventure from a Canadian poet and short story writer who knows how to keep us enthralled. . . . The Girl Being Chased is one of the most enduring figures of chivalric and chauvinistic literature. . . a strikingly pensive novel, anchored by the stark beauty of its setting and the harsh wisdom of its narrator. . . . Adamson is as captivating with descriptions of vast mountain ranges as she is with the smaller calamities. . . her story will unsettle your dreams just the same."
- Washington Post
(Source: www.anansi.ca)
