8:30pm
Friends Like These
Sara Peters, Megan Gail Coles and Anakana Schofield
Hosted by Nina Jane Drystek
Sunday
Oct , 2019
27
Each character is rendered with such stunning details and unflinching insights that you can’t leave this novel’s pages without being changed. To read Megan Gail Coles’s masterful debut is to become obsessed with it.
Poet Nina Jane Drystek hosts an evening spotlighting three of the most challenging and innovative books of the year and a conversation on how we connect and disconnect with those around us in the face of an often cruel world.
An experimental fiction, I Become a Delight to My Enemies uses many different voices and forms to tell the stories of the women who live in an uncanny Town, uncovering their experiences of shame, fear, cruelty, and transcendence. Sara Peters combines poetry and short prose vignettes to create a singular, unflinching portrait of a Town in which the lives of girls and women are shaped by the brutality meted upon them and by their acts of defiance and yearning towards places of safety and belonging.
February in Newfoundland is the longest month of the year. Another blizzard is threatening to tear a strip off downtown St. John’s, while inside the Hazel Restaurant a storm system of sex, betrayal, addiction, and hurt is breaking overhead. Megan Gail Coles’ Giller-nominated novel Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club is a blistering Newfoundland Gothic for the twenty-first century, a portrait of a place in the throes of enormous change, where two women confront the traumas of their past in an attempt to overcome the present and to pick up a future.
Bina: A Novel in Warnings is the latest bestseller from Anakana Schofield whose previous book, Martin John, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, and whose debut, Malarky, won the Amazon First Novel Award. Through the character of Bina, who is writing out her story on the backs of discarded envelopes, she filters a complex moral universe filled with humour and sadness, love and rage, and the consolations, obligations and mysteries of lifelong friendship.
Books available for purchase at every event: Proceeds support our free children’s literacy programs.