Writers Take Centre Stage

Vancouver and Toronto will be crawling with authors in the month of October. For a sneak peak at the books our authors will be promoting, scroll down. For detailed event schedules visit the websites of the International Festival of Authors and the Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival.

Profoundly influenced by Jane Eyre, Clare Boylan saw Charlotte Brontë’s unfinished fragment of a novel as an opportunity too good to overlook. As she once said in an interview, “I really wanted to find out what happened to Emma next and the only way was to write a book.” The result is Emma Brown, Boylan’s seventh novel and a story that contains all the wit and pathos of Brontë herself. Visit www.readings.org for event details or read more about the book here.

For six weeks in 2001, Ǻsne Seierstad traveled with the commandos of the Northern Alliance during their offensive against the Taliban in Afghanistan. She slept in mud huts on stone floors and travelled through desert, mountains, and steppes on horseback, in military vehicles, and on foot. When the Taliban fell, she left the commandos behind and started on another journey that began with the bearded owner of a bookshop in Kabul. Visit www.readings.org for details or click here for more about the book.

Elisabeth Harvor's All Times Have Been Modern is a love story that is also a record of the writing life. The novel's title comes from the words of the musician Nadia Boulanger: "In art there are no generations, only individuals; all times have been modern." In her most vibrant and immediate work to date, Harvor sets out to prove that Boulanger's statement is true, not only by using the novel's language and structure as its argument, but also by attempting to achieve the tone of intense revelation that the most memorable journals have. Click here to read more about the book or visit www.readings.org for event details.

Montreal writer Jeffrey Moore stormed the international stage with his first novel, Prisoner in a Red Rose Chain , which won the regional and international Commonwealth Writers Prize for best first book in 2000. To follow this auspicious beginning, Moore has produced The Memory Artists, a postmodernist work that employs a variety of narrative voices, footnotes, commentary, and journals to tell a rollicking story that will leave you breathless. Visit www.readings.org for details or click here for more about the book.

Set over a ten-year period (from 1787 to 1797), Emma Donoghue’s Life Mask touches on the lives of more than eighty real people creating an unusual and tricky blend of fact and fiction. Based on the ensuing scandal that erupts when a love triangle between Lord Derby, inventor of the horse race that bears his name, Eliza Ferren, the star of English comedy, and an aristocratic widow, hits the headlines in eighteenth-century London, this gripping historical novel is the perfect story for our modern, media conscious world.  Visit www.readings.org and www.writersfest.bc.ca for event details or click here for more about the book.

There are countless books about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, but Diane Middlebrook’s Her Husband is, according to Publishers Weekly, the authoritative work about the late poets and their dysfunctional marriage. “Astutely reasoned, fluidly written and developed with psychological acuity, the work is a sympathetically balanced assessment of two lives that flamed brightly with the incandescent fire of creative genius.” To read more about Middlebrook’s biography of Ted Hughes, including a review by Elisabeth Harvor, click here. Visit www.readings.org for details or click here for more about the book.

After having worked as an actor, television script writer, and stand-up comic, Mark Billingham published his first crime novel in 2001. Sleepyhead, about a killer who seeks to put his victims in a vegetative state known as Locked-in Syndrome and the compassionate detective investigator who's trying to prevent another attack, was an instant success in the U.K., and compelled Billingham to do a little less comedy and a lot more writing. With four books to his credit, the most recent being Burning Girl, Billingham proves he knows the importance of a strong opening and a big finish. Visit www.writersfest.bc.ca for event details or click here for more about the book.

Farting dogs. Could there be anything more appealing to kids under the age of eight than that? Apparently not, judging by the success New Brunswick author Glen Murray has been having with his picture book Walter the Farting Dog. After taking the world by storm (the book has already been translated into fourteen languages), the smelly but loveable pooch with an irrepressible appetite is heading to Hollywood. Not bad for a gassy mutt. Visit www.readings.org for event details or click here for more about the book.

When Tim Wynne Jones published his first children's book in 1976 there were only 35 children's books published that year in all of Canada. It's no wonder the talented author was one of them. Since then, Wynne Jones has published over twenty books for children and adults, among them the ever popular Zoom the Cat, and a Governor General's award-winning collection of short stories, Some of the Kinder Planets. As well, Wynne Jones is the editor of Boys' Own, an anthology of Canada's best-known and most-loved writers created specifically to appeal to boys. Visit www.readings.org for details or click here for more about the book.