emma donoghue is returning!
“What begins as a larky story of unlikely male bonding turns into an off-center but far richer novel about the unheralded, imperfect heroism of two women — Michael’s incarcerated mother and Noah’s long deceased one — and the way we preserve the past and prepare for the future. What is family, anyway, but an elaborate web of story and memory, stretching backward and forward to connect us through time? Whether we’re brought together by blood or circumstance, it’s the psychic inheritance that inevitably wins out, equipping us with a sense of who we are and how we might ourselves respond when life invites us to answer the call, to live with skin fully in the game.
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many of you will remember the night when emma donoghue delighted us with her observations about her book, ‘the wonder’. emma has a new book, ‘akin’, and we are delighted to announce that she is returning to kitchener on monday march 30 to talk with us about it. for tickets, click here
A tale of love, loss and family, in which a retired New York professor’s life is thrown into chaos when he takes his great-nephew to the French Riviera, in hopes of uncovering his own mother's wartime secrets. Noah is only days away from his first trip back to Nice since he was a child when a social worker calls looking for a temporary home for Michael, his eleven-year-old great-nephew. Though he has never met the boy, he gets talked into taking him along to France. This odd couple, suffering from jet lag and culture shock, argue about everything from steak haché to screen time, and the trip is looking like a disaster. But as Michael's ease with tech and sharp eye help Noah unearth troubling details about their family’s past, both of them come to grasp the risks that people in all eras have run for their loved ones, and find they are more akin than they knew.
“If Room forced home truths on us, about parenthood, responsibility and love, Akin deals with similar subject matter more subtly, but in the end just as compellingly; like Noah and Michael, the books are superficially different, but fundamentally connected. This is a quietly moving novel that shows us how little we know one another, but how little, perhaps, we need to know in order to care.”