I arrived at Halifax’s Pier 21 at 19 months old and have lived in Montreal for most of my life, yet I have always considered myself a displaced person. My father was from Belarus, my mother from Poland, and I was born in Germany. Yet, I am not from any of those places. I have lived in Canada, in Quebec, all my life, but I’m not from here either. I denied my ‘otherness’ until my mid-forties when suddenly, I finally understood that most of the planet is comprised of people just like me, struggling to understand how we fit in a world that is in constant flux.
This book has a premise that resonates with me, rooted in my belief that at birth, we are handed a suitcase that someone else packed.
A haunting, heartbreaking drama, the novel follows a mysterious WWII mail-order bride who assumes a dead woman's identity to immigrate to Canada. After she gives birth, she abandons her daughter, leaving behind only a diary.
When I came across Richler’s novel, I was stunned to find echoes of my own novel’s plot. Richler’s daughter—in search of her missing mother—is an achingly poignant reminder of the power exerted by buried family secrets and mother-daughter bonds gone awry, a theme that will always draw me in.
The Imposter Bride by Nancy Richler is an unforgettable novel about a mysterious mail-order bride in the wake of WWII, whose sudden decision ripples through time to deeply impact the daughter she never knew
In the wake of World War II, a young, enigmatic woman named Lily arrives in Montreal on her own, expecting to be married to a man she's never met. But, upon seeing her at the train station, Sol Kramer turns her down. Out of pity, his brother Nathan decides to marry her instead, and pity turns into a deep―and doomed―love. It is immediately clear that Lily…
With irresistible sly humor, a sharp eye for character, and a belief that stories can save us, Mikhail Iossel led me on a merry chase.
In his collection of 20 short stories, he paints a bitingly funny, deeply disturbing picture of a tough Soviet childhood and what it means to grow up Jewish in Leningrad. I recognized that the challenges of those early Soviet years prepared him for the immigrant experience of coming to America.
These stories are true to the Russian nature that wildly vacillates between comedy and tragedy. I loved this collection, which held me in thrall until I finished reading in record time.
Comedy and tragedy collide in stories of family life in Soviet Russia and the complexities of the immigrant experience
"We can't stop turning the pages of this book." -Ilya Kaminsky, New York Times Book Review
From the moment of its founding, the USSR was reviled and admired, demonized and idealized. Many Jews saw the new society ushered in by the Russian Revolution as their salvation from shtetl life with its deprivations and deadly pogroms. But Soviet Russia was rife with antisemitism, and a Jewish boy growing up in Leningrad learned early, harsh, and enduring lessons.
Katie's Gamble is an unexpected, unique story about a young woman who's trying to support her younger siblings by keeping her family's confectionery shop open.
In order to do that, she has to take on her older brother, who's a notorious gambler in Louisiana. Additionally, she has to outsmart Rowdy…
This is a masterpiece of storytelling that paints scenes with a featherlight touch.
With an economy of words I greatly admire, Kim Thúy’s semi-autobiography reveals a rich story about a young girl’s escape from war-torn Vietnam. Ru explores the hardships of being a refugee, one who must grapple with finding her identity in a foreign culture.
I love the lyricism and Thúy's ability to conjure a scene through small, haunting vignettes.
Ru: In Vietnamese it means lullaby; in French it is a small stream, but also signifies a flow - of tears, blood, money. Kim Thuy's Ru is literature at its most crystalline: the flow of a life on the tides of unrest and on to more peaceful waters. In vignettes of exquisite clarity, sharp observation and sly wit, we are carried along on an unforgettable journey from a palatial residence in Saigon to a crowded and muddy Malaysian refugee camp, and onward to a new life in Quebec. There, the young girl feels the embrace of a new community, and…
This is a sweeping saga, the kind I love because it keeps me turning pages.
Against a backdrop of 20th-century China, I was drawn into the fate of a cast of captivating characters. Split into two locales and timelines—Vancouver in 1991 and China from the mid-20th century to the tragedy in1989—the novel is a jigsaw puzzle of countless bits, revealed with skill and delicacy as the pieces finally fit together.
Here is the Cultural Revolution; there Tiananmen Square and in between I was caught up in the lives so cruelly marked by history.
"In a single year, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life. I was ten years old."
Master storyteller Madeleine Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations-those who lived through Mao's Cultural Revolution and their children, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square. At the center of this epic story are two young women, Marie and Ai-Ming. Through their relationship Marie strives to piece together the tale of her fractured family in present-day Vancouver, seeking…
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
Freedman explores all the themes I love and write about in my own work: long-buried family secrets, inherited trauma, and the lasting effects of being displaced.
I related to the protagonist’s search for identity while uncovering her family secrets, something I only began doing in my late 40s. To my surprise, I discovered I was not alone. And that is why we read: to know we are not alone.
Alice Stein, a young graduate student living in a vivid and chaotic late-90s East Village, loses her father and grandmother in a single year. In the process of cleaning out her grandmother's Brooklyn apartment, she begins to unlock a family secret. Accompanied by her precocious downstairs neighbour, a twelve-year-old girl named Persephone, she sets out on a quest to understand her family and herself. In the process, she will discover lost children and buried love affairs, histories she wants to believe and people she can't trust, a village in Hungary and an artist's loft in Harlem. A coming-of-age story about…
A mother suddenly disappears. Two real estate moguls haggle over a plot of useless land. A complicated love affair struggles to overcome history. A suitcase waits to be unpacked in this 300-page literary thriller.
A Jewish woman agonizes over her mother’s suicide and is thrown into turmoil over her attraction to a German. Hannah Baran, 45, divorced, and a successful Montreal real estate broker, has a highly lucrative client who, like her parents, is a Holocaust survivor. Born in a German Displaced Persons camp, Hannah is the only child of Rokhl and the late Barak. One day, she arrives to take her mother to a doctor’s appointment, but Rokhl is gone, leaving behind her identification and a note that reads: I am not her.
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
Almost Home is a fictional retelling of the last great tragedy of the Civil War.
In late April 1865, almost 2,000 newly freed Union prisoners of war are packed onto the steamer Sultana, in poor repair and with a listed capacity of 376 passengers. Among them are four Indiana soldiers…
