Now and Then
with Elaine Feeney and Eimear McBride
Hosted by David O’Meara
In presenting both a political and personal history, Feeney delivers a moving meditation on enforced female roles in Irish society both past and present, the heavy pall of grief and the unceasing encroachment of the past into the present.
Join Ottawa’s Poet Laureate, David O’Meara, for an unforgettable afternoon with two of Ireland’s most acclaimed novelists whose work explores family, memory, and hope.
Elaine Feeney, the Booker-nominated author of How to Build a Boat returns with Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way a multi-generational family story about grief, inheritance, and learning to live with the past—and with yourself. Claire O’Connor is a promising writer who left the family’s struggling farmstead for London and love, swearing never to return. But after the unexpected death of her mother and her father’s diagnosis of cancer, she decides to return home to care for him. When Tom, her lost London love, unexpectedly shows up the next town over, her anxieties and obsessions collide.
The City Changes Its Face, the latest novel from Eimear McBride, winner of the Women’s Prize, is the story of a passionate love affair arriving at its first test. It’s 1995. Outside their grimy window, the city rushes by. But in the flat, there is only Stephen and Eily. Their bodies, the tangled sheets. Unpacked boxes stacked in the kitchen and the total obsession of new love. Eighteen months later, the flat feels different. Love is merging with reality. Stephen’s teenage daughter has re-appeared, while Eily has made a choice, the consequences of which she cannot outrun. Now they face a reckoning for all that’s been left unspoken—emotions, secrets and ambitions. Tonight, if they are to find one another again, what must be said aloud?
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
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