All posts by Heather

About Heather

Heather is the Librarian II, Literacy and Readers' Advisory, with the Vaughan Public Libraries. Her job is to connect leisure readers and aspiring writers with the endless space of imagination and creation through words in all forms.  |  Meet the team

Genevieve Graham: Making the Lesser-Known Canadian History Accessible

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On November 18, Genevieve Graham, the Globe and Mail No. 1 bestselling author of Letters Across the Sea and The Forgotten Home Child, will be visiting Vaughan Public Libraries’ Adult Book Club via Zoom. Despite all the battles that the pandemic brought upon, it did teach us one useful thing – to embrace the virtual meeting space, where we get to meet Genevieve, who’s now far away in Nova Scotia. Please register here and enjoy an evening of good conversations with Genevieve!

Genevieve is known for writing about the little-known or much-forgotten Canadian history. The Forgotten Home Child is about over 120,000 destitute children shipped from England to Canada to be used as labour on Canadian farms and households between 1869 and 1932. The book has first made me aware of the abuse and stigmatization that these home children received. And her current bestseller, Letters Across the Sea, has introduced me to the anti-semitic Christie Pits Riot in 1933 and the suffering of the undertrained Canadian soldiers at the inhuman Japanese camps during WWII.

Those heart-wrenching stories have made Genevieve and readers shed millions of tears. But Genevieve’s writing has made the cruel, hard facts digestible as well. Genevieve reminds me of Pierre Berton, the historian who had popularized Canadian history with his light, fast-paced writing style, just all in non-fiction. We should know historical fiction is as powerful as non-fiction history books. In Genevieve’s words, “History itself is in black and white. It feels far away and cold. Bringing the colour of fictional characters into a well-researched point in history, essentially breathing life back into the history, makes the past real. It’s much more difficult to forget a story if you care about the characters, and so history is remembered.” She believes “historical fiction has a huge responsibility: we must teach the mind but also touch the heart.” And she has done this job brilliantly!

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Who Will Win Giller This Year?

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The Giller Prize 2021 longlist was announced on September 8, the International Literacy Day. From these twelve titles that were chosen amongst the 132 books submitted by publishers across Canada, the jury announced the finalist on October 5, and these five titles will be competing for the most prestigious and richest Canadian literary award on November 8, 9 PM.

This year’s longlist selection is as diverse as Canada itself – in the jury’s words, the longlist “showcases an ecstatic diversity of voices and styles, of narrative deployment and moral urgency, of formal innovation and old-fashioned storytelling pleasure. There is something for everyone on this list, but within each of these books there is to be found beauty, honest reckoning, human compassion, and the irrefutable mark of the sublime.”

Each longlisted title is brilliant and unique, but part of the game is that the jury must pick out five finalists and one winner. How brutal! Fortunately, that doesn’t mean that we can’t talk about the longlisted titles that didn’t make the shortlist here (thanks to VPL for giving us this platform!). So, the three books that I’m going to share with you, one made the finalist, the other two not, yet all of them are definitely worth-noting.

What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkard

Believing in fiction’s power to make a change in the world, the former The Globe and Mail journalist, El Akkard, became a full-time novelist. After his award-winning debut novel American War, his second novel What Strange Paradise is again creating tremendous impact – it is now in this year’s Giller shortlist.

What Strange Paradise offers a timely response to the refugee crisis at the southern U.S. border and the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean. It is a harrowing read, right from the first line: “The child lies on the shore. All around him the beach is littered with the wreckage of the boat and the wreckage of its passengers.” But, as readers’ hearts are going to break, El Akkard gives them hope: “A wave brushes gently against the child’s hair. He opens his eyes.” When the child, the only survivor of the shipwreck, awakes in the Greek island and tries to escape from the authority, Vanna, a native teenage girl, did everything in her power to save him. (The Globe and Mail)

It’s a wonderfully told story about humanity in its simplest form, where right and wrong is crystal clear – a much-needed, powerful message in the midst of this world’s never-ending, tumultuous sociopolitical upheavals! (Quill & Quire)

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Three Notable Novels from East Asia

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Travel is one of the most missed activities during the pandemic, and the lowering Covid positivity rate is certainly giving us hope to resume international travel – soon, not quite yet! For now, we can continue to quench our thirst with videos and travel guides, I suppose. And, if you haven’t, what about reading a few popular novels from the countries that you want to visit? I know, you may question how much fiction will actually tell us about the real world, but I would say fiction is arguably one of the best channels to immerse ourselves into a different culture. A well-researched novel can tell us the most intricate nuances of another culture: their people, their life, their ideologies, their desires, and their dreams – the hidden world that we can’t easily access when we do a two-week or three-week travel.

I will start with East Asia in this post. There are so many great books from this part of the world, and I wish I could include more titles, but let’s start with three that I know.

Book cover of The Three-Body Problem: by Liu, Cixin

China

The Three-body Problem by Cixin Liu

The three-body problem is unsolvable, “as the motion of the bodies quickly becomes chaotic” (Britannica). In this first installment of a trilogy, the Hugo Award winning author asks the most classic and unanswerable question in hard sci-fi: “What would it mean for the human race to come in contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence?”

Because of the elaborate world building, the novel is a bit slow to start, but once it gets up and running, the thrilling suspense grips readers all the way to the end. The work offers many interesting “lengthy passages of technical exposition about everything from quantum mechanics to artificial intelligence.” (NPR) While the unique historical backdrop (Cultural Revolution) requires some effort to chew on, Liu skillfully pushes the moral dilemmas beyond specific nationalities or abstract physics, and asks: “Is science truly objective and provable, or is it simply the best we can do given our limited understanding of four dimensions?” (Rick Riordan)

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