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Tuesday, October 22
What’s your story? Writing and designing distinctive company history and personal biography books since 1999.
www.echomemoirs.com
Brazen fiction like
Tamara Faith Berger’s
Little Cat,
innovative poetry like Mathew Henderson’s
The Lease
and our incendiary new nonfiction line,
Exploded Views.
Boom.
Find us at chbooks.com.
Grand Openings – The Alma Lee Opening Night Event Joseph Boyden, Eleanor Catton, Sahar Delijani, Viola Di Grado, Rachel Kushner, Earl Lovelace, Andrew Pyper Host: Hal Wake
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An Intimate Evening with Scott Turow
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8:00 pm
WATERFRONT THEATRE $26
8:00 pm
PERFORMANCE WORKS $26
Fasten your seatbelts for this whirlwind trip around the world. Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning author Joseph Boyden opens the Writers Fest in grand style with his new novel The Orenda, which begins with the kidnapping of an Iroquois child during the 1630s. New Zealander Eleanor Catton moves us along in history to 1866 with a vintage crime novel involving astrology and the gold rush. Sahar Delijani takes us to post-revolutionary Iran with her chilling fictionalized account of her family’s struggles and the brutalities they endured. Italy’s Viola Di Grado’s unusual love story is as unpredictable as the human heart itself. American Rachel Kushner goes underground into the New York art scene in the 1970s in her much-lauded novel The Flamethrowers. Trinidadian Earl Lovelace brings calypso, with its history of social commentary, protest and praise, to the rhythm of his new novel. And Canada’s Andrew Pyper brings us home again with his literary thriller The Demonologist, which one reviewer said will “frighten you out of your shoes.”
Scott Turow was dubbed “Bard of the Litigious Age” by Time magazine shortly after the publication of his 1987 runaway bestseller Presumed Innocent. Turow has since produced nine legal thrillers, bestsellers that have sold over 25 million copies, been translated into more than 25 languages and adapted for screen. Harvard Law School– educated, former Assistant US Attorney in Chicago, Turow is now a partner in the international law firm Dentons, working pro bono for most of his cases and all the while managing to produce a new page-turner every couple of years. Be among the first to get the backstory behind his latest, Identical. It should be illegal to be this thrilled.
This event is sponsored by Simon & Schuster Canada.
The Secret Lives of Parents Brian Fawcett, Priscila Uppal, Alison Wearing moderator: kathryn gretsinger
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8:00 pm
STUDIO 1398 $19
How well do we know our parents? How often do we see them as individuals with very personal hopes, heartaches and desires? To write Human Happiness, Brian Fawcett asked his mother, then approaching 90, 40 questions that she answered expansively and with candour: “What is your biggest regret in life?” “How important is sex to achieving happiness?” Alison Wearing learned at age 12 that her father was gay. In Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter, Wearing moves from concealing her father’s sexual orientation from her friends to seeing him as interesting, entertaining and inspiring. Abandoned by her mother when she was seven, Priscila Uppal encountered her again as an adult when the two spent 10 intensely emotional days together. These are memoirs about mothers and fathers that may move you to look at your own.
Leonardo: The Man Behind the Genius
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Ross King in conversation with kirk lapointe
8:00 pm
IMPROV CENTRE $19
A two-time winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, Ross King’s latest book, Leonardo and the Last Supper, focuses on five years in Leonardo’s life as he went from a “discouraged and almost washed-up 42-year-old artist to the toast of Europe.” To get behind that story, King combed through tens of thousands of words from Leonardo’s journals and memos trying to get a handle on the man behind the painting. He found a short-sighted fellow who always forgot his glasses, a painter who made word lists to boost his vocabulary, a character who, luckily for King, never threw anything away. King excels at finding and telling the inside stories, and tonight you’ll get an insider’s look at the man we thought was the most well-known Renaissance genius.