Will I love Fall on Your Knees?

I’m Canadian and, like all theatre people of my era, I first fell in love with MacDonald’s writing when I saw her ingenious breakout play, Good Night, Desdemona, Good Morning, Juliet. Then she published this, a captivating Maritime gothic full of ghosts and other hauntings, as well as visual doublings, such as mistaken identities, breathtaking in their wit.

Loosely inspired by the author’s own family history on Cape Breton Island, including both Lebanese and Gaelic-Canadian strands, this novel is a stunning example of historical fiction that is deadly accurate in its evocations of societal, cultural, and geographic… show more.

This compelling family saga set on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia was published in 1996 and explores the lives of the complicated Piper family in the early 20th century.

My late mother was from Glace Bay, a mining town on Cape Breton, and I remember she was quite excited when she heard about Ms. MacDonald’s drama, and promptly bought a copy. She told me she couldn’t get beyond the first few chapters because it was far too filthy for her taste. Naturally, I then had to read the whole novel to find out just how controversial the book… show more.

This book had me at the first line… “They’re all dead now.” Fall on Your Knees is haunted with ghosts and music and religion and set in a dark, lonely coal mining community of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia Canada. From there it meanders to New York and through the no man’s land of WWI, all the while spewing secrets and lies of five generations of the Piper family. The mysterious atmosphere of this book and the compelling characters kept me reading constantly. I couldn’t put the book down until I had consumed all five hundred sixty-six pages.