Please join us for night one of the In Her Voice summer readings program. We will be joined by Sarah Henstra, Thea Lim, and Jessica Westhead, three local female fiction authors who will be reading from their most recent works. Light refreshments will be served.

When:

July 10, 2018 @6-8pm

(Readings begin at 6:30)

Where:

Ben McNally Books

366 Bay Street

Cost:

Free!

Sarah Henstra is a professor of English at Ryerson University. She is the author of the young adult novel Mad Miss Mimic. The Red Word is her first work of adult fiction. She lives in Toronto.

The battle of the sexes goes to college in this nervy debut adult novel by a powerful new voice

The Red Word captures beautifully the feverish binarism of campus politics and the headlong rush of youth toward new friends, lovers, and life-altering ideas. With strains of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, Alison Lurie’s Truth and Consequences, and Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, Sarah Henstra’s debut adult novel arrives on the wings of furies.

Thea Lim’s writing has been published by the Southampton Review, the Guardian, Salon, the Millions, Bitch Magazine, Utne Reader, and others, and she has received multiple awards and fellowships for her work. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston and she previously served as nonfiction editor at Gulf Coast. She grew up in Singapore and lives in Toronto with her family.

An unforgettable love story of two people who are at once mere weeks and many years apart, for readers of Station Eleven.

 An Ocean of Minutes is a gorgeous, devastating novel about courage, yearning, the cost of holding onto the past–and the price of letting it go.

Jessica Westhead‘s critically acclaimed short story collection And Also Sharks, published by Cormorant Books in 2011, was a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book, a nominee for the CBC Bookie Awards and a ReLit Award, and a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Short Fiction Prize. CBC Books has called her one of the “10 Canadian women writers you need to read now.” Jessica lives in Toronto with her husband and daughter.

We know them; sometimes we are them.

Things Not to Do is a collection of stories that seeks to examine—through humour, wit, empathy, and honesty—the dark side of ordinary people. A man attends a gathering on the coattails of his new, zealously empowering friend. A woman helps her husband build an escape room to free him from working for a hated boss. A veteran wedding DJ imparts wisdom, and more besides, to a new recruit. The father of a teen pop sensation gathers with his fans in the wake of a controversy. The actions of these characters, for good or ill—and there is light in their lives, as often as there is dark—stem from the same place, and Westhead cuts right to the heart of that place. They aren’t scheming supervillains; they’re folks trying to make the most of what they think they have—even if that sometimes means stepping on someone who doesn’t deserve it.