Georgina Danforth Witley has never felt she has led anything but an ordinary life. But here she is on her way to meet the Queen. Born on April 21, 1926, the exact same day as Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, Georgie is one of 99 privileged Commonwealth subjects invited to an 80th-birthday lunch at Buckingham Palace. All she has to do is drive two hours to the airport and board the plane for London. Except that in her excited state, Georgie drives her car off the road, tumbling hood over trunk into a thickly wooded ravine. Thrown from the car, injured and unable to move but desperately hopeful that someone will find her, she must rely on her strength, her full store of family memories, her no-nonsense wit and a recitation of the names of the bones in her body—a long-forgotten exercise from childhood that reminds her she is still very much alive.
As Georgina lies stranded and helpless, she reflects on her role as a daughter, mother, sister, wife and widow; she casts back over family histories, lost loves and painful secrets. What has it all amounted to? Frances Itani has given us an insightful, moving and beautifully written novel, fanciful and profound by turns. Remembering the Bones goes deeply into the life of an ordinary person who, in her instincts to survive, becomes extraordinary.
Grand Dan sat with her head bowed while she listened to the memories of a lineup of colleagues and patients, and then she laughed with a sudden, short bark. It was as if she was telling them that they knew nothing of Dr. Matthias Danforth, whom she had loved. She had held him between her thighs; she had run her hand down the muscles of his back; she was the one who made King Edward cake the way he liked it, with walnuts ground into the icing. . . . She was the one whose skin, under his tracing fingers, had turned to silk. —From Remembering the Bones

Remembering the Bones

Literature & Fiction

frances-itani

Literary

Harper Collins Canada

Deafening

British & Irish

Hodder&Stoughton

Contemporary

TRAFALGAR SQUARE +

New English Library

As noted by Quill & Quire, Frances Itani is an awardwinning writer. Most recently, she won the Tilden/Saturday Night/CBC LiteraryAward for two consecutive years; an impressive feat as the stories are submittedto the jurors for evaluation anonymously. Now, Itani expands her controlof the short story medium, with her new novel, LEANING, LEANING OVER WATER,a series of connected short stories.Almost all the narration is by Trude, the middle child of the King family.She has been told that her position in the family makes her the family collectorand teller of stories. The stories she recounts crystallize crucial momentsduring the life of her family, the people around them, and the social climate ofpre-Quiet Revolution Quebec.The stories begin after the father has moved his family to a rural area onthe Quebec side of the Ottawa River, where he has taken a job paintingfleur-de-lis on tin trays in a nearby factory. For the children this means theygrow up in delightful wilderness surrounded by people and customs which arecompletely new, but leaves their English speaking, non-swimming mother inisolation. The family is cut off from much of the world, but there is much ofthe world around them. They learn of their individuality through the culturaldifferences they find between themselves and their nearest neighbours, the RomanCatholic family down the way. They learn about sex and despair first handthrough the few adults around them. And they are constantly exposed to life anddeath, and miracles through their constant contact with the river itself.The Ottawa River ( the "water" referred to in the title) bordersthe King family abode and wends its way through every story in the novel --always rushing past, bringing with it joys and sorrows, its power never to beunderestimated, nor taken lightly -- underscoring the frailty of life lived onits banks.

'LEANING, LEANING OVER WATER'

Sceptre

Leaning, Leaning Over Water

SCEPTRE (HODD)

Best Friend Trouble

Orca Book Publishers

The international debut sensation Deafening launched the story of Grania, deaf from the age of five, and her sister Tress, who helped to create their secret language. Tell picks up from the return of the sisters' husbands from the war, and follows Tress's partner Kenan, a young shell-shocked soldier who confines himself indoors, venturing outside only at night to visit the frozen bay where he skated as a boy. Saddened by her altered marriage, Tress seeks advice from her Aunt Maggie. But Maggie and her husband Am have problems of their own. Maggie finds joy singing in the town's newly created choral society. Am, troubled by the widening gulf in his marriage, spends more and more time in the clock tower above their apartment. As the second decade of the 20th century draws to a close, the lives of the two couples become increasingly entwined. Startling revelations surface as layers of silence begin to crumble.Told with Itani's signature power and grace, Tell is both a deeply moving story about the burdens of the past, and a beautifully rendered reminder of how the secrets we bury to protect ourselves can also be the cause of our undoing.

Tell

Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio

Set on the eve of the Great War, Deafening is a novel of remarkable virtuosity and power spanning two continents and the life and loves of a young deaf woman in Canada named Grania O'Neill. As a result of a childhood illness, Grania's is a world without sound, a world bounded by a powerful family love that tries to insulate her from undue suffering. When it becomes clear that Grania can no longer thrive in the world of the hearing, her family sends her to live at the Ontario School for the Deaf where, protected from the often unforgiving hearing world outside, she learns sign language and speech. Then she meets Jim Lloyd, a hearing man, and the two, in wonderment, begin to create a new emotional vocabulary that encompasses both sound and silence. But as history would have it, Jim must leave home only two weeks after their wedding to serve as a stretcher-bearer on the blood-soaked battlefields of Flanders. During this long and brutal war of attrition, Jim and Grania are pulled to the center of cataclysmic events that will alter civilization forever.

BRILLIANCE AUDIO ^

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