to celebrate our first year as a club, we're teaming up with our friends at the new quarterly literary magazine for a special night of great food, great literature and great people to support a local literary endeavour, the wild writers literary festival. on friday november 6th, we hope you'll join us for dinner, wine and a special talk with two award-winning authors at the balsillie school.

here's the deal. with your ticket you get:

a casual "build your own taco" dinner at the balsillie school catered by taco farm
complimentary wine
copies of both "sleep" by nino ricci and "long change" by don gillmor
lots of opportunities to chat with all the festival authors at the dinner
q&a in the auditorium with nino ricci and don gillmor, moderated by craig norris from cbc radio

tickets go on sale on the "join us" page of this website on october 1

Don Gillmor's brilliant new novel, Long Change, examines the world of oil through the life and loves of one man; both stories are epic.

Fleeing his violent, Pentecostal father, as well as a crime he committed in the parking lot of the first bar he ever entered, Ritt Devlin leaves Texas at fifteen, crossing the border into Alberta. Big for his age, he soon finds work on an oil rig on the outskirts of Medicine Hat. But that's not the life he wants, and he saves up to study geology. By the time he's in his early twenties he's the head of his own oil company.

Spanning almost seventy years, and following the geology and politics of oil from Texas to the Canadian oil patch, to Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Azerbaijan, various political capitals, and the Arctic, Long Change is divided into three parts, each of them framed by one of Ritt's marriages. The first, to his great love, Oda, shows the beginnings of his company; that marriage is cut short when Oda dies of cancer while carrying their first child. His second wife is Deirdre, an elegant lawyer who helps Ritt expand Mackenzie Oil, but who needs more than business from her marriage. Then there is Alexa, a late middle age fling, a bad idea on both sides, in some ways as violent and delusional as the oil business.

The vision that drives Ritt throughout his life is to drill in pristine Arctic waters, and he pulls it off. But then comes the inevitable disaster. Ritt, now in his eighties, is not the man he was in any sense of the word. As he staggers away from the scene of the disaster, through the Arctic night, we know the dream of oil and of his own company is also burning in the night...

From multi-award winning author Nino Ricci comes a novel of harrowing emotional power and suspense, the story of one man’s descent into sleeplessness.

David Pace is a man who seems to have it all – a successful career as an almost-famous academic, a wife blessed with both beauty and brains, a young son and a lovely home. It is only when he comes down with a rare sleep disorder that the careful lies he has stitched together to form his perfect life begin to unravel. As sleep both haunts him and eludes him he descends into a twilight world that leaves his family in tatters and his career on the brink. Then he finds himself with a loaded gun in his hands, and all of a sudden he feels tantalizingly, gloriously awake.

Fuelled by a steady mix of pharmaceuticals, David’s desperate quest to get free of the fog his disorder has plunged him into pushes him towards the very extremes of human behaviour. As he takes ever greater risks and makes ever more destructive choices his sense of what is real and who he is and what he is capable of begins to slip terrifyingly out of reach.