In Kim Thuy’s autobiographical novel Ru, the narrator recounts her childhood in war torn Saigon and her family’s remarkable journey from Vietnam to the squalor of a Malaysian refugee camp, to finally finding a new life in Quebec as a survivor with the ‘boat people’. In short evocative scenes Thuy seamlessly connects memory and history, past and present. Her sensual language conveys a very vivid atmosphere and keen observations. She even finds humour in the most unlikely situations. This short, powerfully written first novel won the Governor General Literary Award for French Fiction in 2010.
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Bernadette Preyde
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Nancy Fischer
As Julie Wheelwright explores the epic life of her distant relative Esther Wheelwright she also brings a unique perspective to the 18th century struggle for political and religious dominance in North America.
Wheelwright tells the irresistible story of a 7 year old New England Puritan daughter kidnapped by Abenaki warriors and then adopted by an Abenaki family. Since the tribe was an ally of the French, she was baptized into Catholicism and traded to the French. Esther then had the harrowing choice: be ransomed back to the English Puritans and face a lifetime of their condemnation or enter the convent and be saved. She chose the latter and rose to become Mother Superior of the Ursuline Convent in Quebec City. When Quebec City surrendered to the British in 1759, Mother Esther Marie-Joseph Wheelwright de L’Enfant Jesus opened the convent doors to all those in need of refuge. |
chérie
Investigative journalist Scott Carney unveils the murky underworld of the trade in human bodies in The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers. The Red Market is an exposé on this little-known, profitable global market. Carney takes the reader from Cyprus to India to reveal stories of trade in human tissue; women who rent their wombs as surrogates; grave robbers who pilfer tombs for skeletons; organ and blood donations for profit; and unscrupulous practices in infertility clinics and orphanages. Each personal account has a common thread. The individual vending their body parts or tissues is most often poor and selling their body part is seen as a passport out of poverty. Carney questions the ethics of the poor selling their body parts to meet the medical demands of the rich. The Red Market is very enlightening. The macabre nature of some of the chapters can make for an uncomfortable read. |
