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2017-18 Literary Lecture Series- Series 2 (thursdays)

March 28 clock 03:56 PM

Venue

Heliconian Hall
Toronto, ON

plus Radar

Ticket Booth

Includes 13% HST (108122466RT0001)

Event Details

This popular series has been described as a cross between a traditional book club and a university course without exams.  This year it will consist of two separate series consisting of nine two-hour sessions, each including a lecture, question period and refreshments. Both series run from September 2017 to June 2018.  

There are authors you will be familiar with, talented newcomers with whom you will be impressed and up and coming international authors. Once again there are non-fiction titles whose content is timely and informative, and entertaining.

Subscription cost for non-members of the Heliconian Club is $200 including HST (108122466RT0001). Please remember we sell out early, so purchase your subscriptions as soon as possible. 

For first time subscribers, the doors open at 6:45pm, with the lectures beginning at 7:30, so come early to get the seats you want and to enjoy the refreshments. We will have a bookseller from Ben McNally Books, for the first Tuesday and Thursday in September and the first Tuesday and Thursday in January. They will bring several copies of each series’ books so that you will be able to purchase books for the fall, winter and spring series if you haven’t already managed to get them. 

Featured Program

           WHEN                                       SPEAKER / AUTHOR

  • Thursday, September 14            Gary Barwin / Gary Barwin
    • Yiddish for Pirates
  • Thursday, October 26                David Adams Richards / David Adams Richards​
    • Principles to Live By
  • Thursday, November 23            Charlotte Gray / Charlotte Gray
    • The Promise of Canada
  • Thursday, January 11                Kate Taylor / Kate Taylor​
    • Serial Monogamy
  • Thursday, February 22              Deborah Campbell / Deborah Campbell
    • Disappearance in Damascus
  • Thursday, March 22                  Diane Schoemperlen / Diane Schoemperlen​
    • This Is Not My Life
  • Thursday, April 19                   Sandra Martin interviews Katherena Vermette / Katherena Vermette
    • The Break
  • Thursday, May24                     Eva Stachniak / Eva Stachniak
    • The Chosen Maiden
  • Thursday, June 7                     Jasmine D’Costa / Jasmine D’Coasta
    • ​​A Matter of Geography

BOOK DESCRIPTIONS SERIES 2

Gary Barwin: Yiddish For Pirates. Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and nominated for the Governor-General's Award for Literature, a hilarious, swashbuckling yet powerful tale of pirates, buried treasure and a search for the Fountain of Youth, told in the ribald, philosophical voice of a 500-year-old Jewish parrot.

David Adams Richards: Principles To Live By.  John Delano is a broken man, seemingly at the end of everything: the end of his legendary but controversial career as a police officer; the end of his sad and difficult marriage; the end of his years-long search for the truth of what happened to his missing son; the end of his fruitless quest for personal redemption; even, perhaps, the end of his life. Only one small thing keeps him going: his conviction that he has a final case to solve, centred around the disappearance years ago of a young boy placed in foster care in Saint John, New Brunswick. 

Charlotte Gray: The Promise Of Canada. What does it mean to be a Canadian? What great ideas have changed our country? “Our country owes its success not to some imagined tribal singularity but to the fact that, although its thirty-five million citizens do not look, speak or pray alike, we have learned to share this land and for the most part live in neighbourly sympathy.” —Charlotte Gray

Kate Taylor: Serial Monogamy. What happens when life and ambition collide with betrayal and disease? Sharon's comfortable existence as a novelist, wife and mother to twin daughters is shattered by a cancer diagnosis, and by her husband's affair with a graduate student. The only relief in sight is a new writing project—an engrossing serialized novel based on the story of the 19th-century actress Nelly Ternan, the young mistress of the aging Charles Dickens. 

Deborah Campbell: A Disappearance in Damascus: A Story of Friendship and Survival in the Shadow of War. In the midst of an unfolding international crisis, the renowned journalist, Deborah Campbell, finds herself swept up in the mysterious disappearance of Ahlam, her guide and friend. Her frank, personal account of a journey through fear, and the triumph of friendship and courage, is as riveting as it is illuminating.

Diane Schoemperlen: This Is Not My Life. Never once in my life had I dreamed of being in bed with a convicted killer.”  This Is Not My Life is the story of the romance between Diane and Shane—how they met and fell in love, how they navigated passes and parole and the obstacles facing a long-term prisoner attempting to return to society, and how, eventually, things fell apart.

Katherena Vermette: The Break. When Stella, a young Métis mother, looks out her window one evening and spots someone in trouble on the Break — a barren field on an isolated strip of land outside her house — she calls the police to alert them to a possible crime. In a series of shifting narratives, people who are connected, both directly and indirectly, with the victim — police, family, and friends — tell their personal stories leading up to that fateful night. Winner of the 2017 Amazon First Novel Award.

Eva Stachniak: The Chosen Maiden. Born on the road to dancer parents, the Nijinsky siblings are destined for the stage. Bronia is a gifted young ballerina, but she is quickly eclipsed by her brother, Vaslav. Deemed a prodigy, Vaslav Nijinsky will grow into the greatest, and most incendiary dancer of the early 20th century. To prove herself her brother’s equal in the rigid world of ballet, Bronia will need to be more than extraordinary, defying society’s expectations of what a female dancer can and should be.

Jasmine D’Costa: A Matter of Geography begins in the early 1990’s in the heart of Bombay where young Peter and Anna live with their families ensconced in the Catholic ghetto. Their peaceful lives are shattered when Hindus destroy a mosque in the distant Indian state of Ayodhya and riots break out in Bombay, the worst the city has witnessed.