Please join us at the first In Her Voice event!

Acclaimed novelist Emma Richler will be reading from her new book Be My Wolff, and she’ll be joined by debut novelist Emily Saso, who will be reading from her novel The Weather Inside. 

When:

Monday, February 27, 6:30 p.m.

Where:

Dora Keogh Pub, 141 Danforth Ave.

Be My Wolff by Emma Richler

Knopf Canada

Widely heralded for her bestselling first novel (Feed My Dear Dogs) and award-winning stories (Sister Crazy, also nominated for the Orange Prize), Emma Richler finally returns with a dazzling major novel with the power of A.S. Byatt’s Possession, the wit and wonder of Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda and Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life–about a sister and her adopted brother with a one-of-a-kind connection: a profoundly moving, original love story about the unbreakable ties that bind, and the choices we make or create for ourselves.

Zachariah and Rachel are brother and sister. Well, not exactly. They are star-crossed lovers. Well, not exactly. Rachel is the cherished daughter of a Russian family living in London–the richly imagined, mysterious Wolffs; Zach is her parents’ adopted son who arrived from the orphanage with one sweater, a head of curls and a dexterous set of fists. As children, they became as close as two people can be. But when they crossed a forbidden line, there was no going back. Now, as an adult, coping with their father’s furious rebuttal of Zach, Rachel sets herself the task of inventing a family history for her beloved. And so she brings to life his imagined ancestry–from a tavern-educated boxer in Dickensian times, to a Hussar at the Battle of Borodino during the Napoleonic Wars–even as their troubles in present-day Camden Town build to yet another point of no return. Cartwheeling through history, filled with art and science, fairy tales and folk songs, tsars and foundlings, epic battles in the prize ring and on the Eastern Front, and characters that take over our hearts, Be My Wolff is riveting–wondrous, funny and tragic and of astonishing imagination and beauty.

The Weather Inside by Emily Saso

Freehand Press

It’s summer in Toronto, and the snow and ice are relentless. Too bad no one but Avery can see it.

Avery Gauthier can’t get far enough away from her past: the death of her beloved father, the abuse she suffered as a teen, and the religion that tore her parents apart. A reality-refugee, she’s managed to keep the chaos of her former life at bay… until now.

When her husband returns to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, her estranged mother wants back in, and the snow—invisible to everyone but Avery—piles up and up and up, Avery is forced to face her greatest fears. She looks to the outside for help, to her mysterious superintendent and the comforts of a local weatherman, only to realize that the solutions lie where the problem does: within.

A twisted, darkly funny and redemptive tale, The Weather Inside will leave you wondering where the line is drawn between what’s real and what’s imagined, and why Armageddon isn’t always the end of the world.