Every Happy Family with Cathy Marie Buchanan, Saleema Nawaz and Shyam Selvadurai

Three powerful narratives examine family ties and the ongoing search for home and belonging.    

Paris, 1878. Set at a moment of profound artistic, cultural and societal change, Cathy Marie Buchanan’s acclaimed novel, The Painted Girls, is a tale of two remarkable sisters rendered uniquely vulnerable to the darker impulses of “civilized society.”   

Orphaned as teenagers, Beena and Sadhana have grown up under the exasperated watch of their Sikh uncle, who runs a bagel shop in Montreal's Hasidic community of Mile End. In Bone and Bread, Saleema Nawaz introduces us to an adult Beena grappling with a fresh grief: Sadhana has died suddenly and strangely, her body lying undiscovered for a week before anyone realizes what has happened.  

In Buddhist myth, the dead may be reborn as "hungry ghosts"—spirits with stomach so large they can never be full—if they have desired too much during their lives. The Hungry Ghosts, Shyam Selvadurai’s sweeping new novel, explores how racial, political and sexual differences can tear apart both a country and the human heart—not just once, but many times, until the ghosts are fed and freed.