Agnes’s father is acquitted of murdering his maimed sister, but he still loses his teaching position at McGill University, and abandons his pregnant wife and daughter. But Agnes cannot forget the image she holds of her father. She is not like her younger pretty sister, Laura. She is determined to follow in her father’s footsteps and seek a medical degree at McGill and determined to find her father. In the late 1900s when women are barred from entering the medical faculty, will she succeed?
This fictional book was inspired by the work and professional life of one of Montreal’s first female physicians, Dr Maude Elizabeth Seymour Abbott.
Teza is a political prisoner jailed in solitary confinement in a Burmese prison. He endures his punishment with patience, an ability to focus on any tiny distraction within his cell, and the limited contact with the prison authorities.
I am at a loss as to how this entire novel took place in a jail cell, but still had me captivated by every sentence.
Saffie is a German living in Paris in the 1950s who works for a musician, Raphael. Raphael falls desperately in love with Saffie while she appears strangely aloof. They have a child together, but when Saffie meets Marias, their lives fall apart and Saffie’s haunted past comes to light.
This is Huston at her best. While I read this novel more than a decade ago, it’s tale has always remained embedded in my memory — a sure sign of an exceptional story.
Forgiveness is a memoir to two Canadian families — the Sakamotos from Vancouver and the MacLeans from the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St Lawrence. When war breaks out, Ralph MacLean enlists, and not long after he arrives in Hong Kong he is captured, and spends most of the war in a prison camp. Meanwhile, the British Columbian government is eager to remove the prosperous Japanese community from Powell Street and expels them from their homes into the B.C. interior as farm labour. A generation later, these two families come together when their children marry.
This is an emotional journey, beautifully written that I didn’t want to end.
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