Tuesday, September 22, 2015
7:00pm-9:00pm
Alumni Room
UBC Medical Student & Alumni Centre (MSAC)
2750 Heather Street, Vancouver, BC Canada V5Z 4M2
(Corner of 12th and Heather)
SHORTLISTED 2014 – Scotiabank Giller Prize
Miriam Toews is beloved for her irresistible voice, for mingling laughter and heartwrenching poignancy like no other writer. In her most passionate novel yet, she brings us the riveting story of two sisters, and a love that illuminates life.
You won’t forget Elf and Yoli, two smart and loving sisters. Elfrieda, a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, happily married: she wants to die. Yolandi, divorced, broke, sleeping with the wrong men as she tries to find true love: she desperately wants to keep her older sister alive. Yoli is a beguiling mess, wickedly funny even as she stumbles through life struggling to keep her teenage kids and mother happy, her exes from hating her, her sister from killing herself and her own heart from breaking.
But Elf’s latest suicide attempt is a shock: she is three weeks away from the opening of her highly anticipated international tour. Can she be nursed back to “health” in time? As the situation becomes ever more complicated, Yoli faces the most terrifying decision of her life.
All My Puny Sorrows, at once tender and unquiet, offers a profound reflection on the limits of love, and the sometimes unimaginable challenges we experience when childhood becomes a new country of adult commitments and responsibilities. In her beautifully rendered new novel, Miriam Toews gives us a startling demonstration of how to carry on with hope and love and the business of living even when grief loads the heart.
(from http://penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/228422/all-my-puny-sorrows#9780345808028 )
Discussion facilitated by George Fetherling, a prolific poet, novelist, cultural commentator and memoirist. He has published 50 books of poetry, fiction, criticism, history and biography, including the novel Walt Whitman’s Secret and the poetry collection The Sylvia Hotel Poems
Supported by the Public Education Program, UBC Department of Psychiatry and the Institute of Mental Health.
REVIEWS
Globe & Mail Review of All My Puny Sorrows by Jared Bland
Hold that date! – Our next reading will be on November 24, 2015