Willow has heard stories about her mother's childhood in Prague before WWII, but Willow knows little of Jana’s life after the start of the Holocaust. When Willow and Jana return to Montreal, the past begins to surface.
Fiction. Jewish Studies. Middle Eastern Studies. Women's Studies. IN MANY WATERS is the gripping story of three orphans whose lives intersect on the island of Malta during our current, urgent refugee crisis. Zoe, a budding historian, comes to Malta with her younger brother Cal to learn more about their Maltese mother, as well as the mysterious circumstances surrounding their parents' untimely deaths. The siblings' well-mapped plans are derailed when Cal, who is a daily swimmer in the Mediterranean, discovers a girl floating in the sea, barely alive. The small, battered fishing boat on which she has journeyed from Libya to Malta capsized in a storm: Aziza is the sole survivor. Meanwhile, Zoe returns to the site of her parents' drownings and stumbles across a trail of clues which lead to the discovery of an unknown family member, unearthing a chain of life-changing secrets. IN MANY WATERS brilliantly mines the hearts and minds of characters in extremis, the unforgettable tale of the ways that we love and help one another and how the choices we make reverberate through generations.
Set in a gentrifying Montreal neighbourhood , The Sleep of Apples is a novel-in-stories, told in the voices of nine, closely-linked narrators, sharing crises that confront madness, illness, loss, and gender identity. The book's title, inspired by Federico Garcia Lorca's powerful poem "Gacela of the Dark Death", informs how these stories seamlessly sail on the boundaries of life, sleep, and immortality. Characters hail from a variety of cultures and backgrounds, and stories plumb a variety of identities and how they intersect. These interconnected tales and lives are urgent and timely, and the reader lives side-by-side with them. In one chapter, the protagonist will tell their story, while in the next, they will be seen through a different character's point of view. Readers will see and understand the principal characters from many vantage points, as these tales form a richly layered ring, circling back to where they began. Ultimately, The Sleep of Apples dramatizes how we all live imperfect lives. We love what we have and mourn what we've lost in the community of life, death, and the liminal in-between.