Search Results: Returned 6 Results, Displaying Titles 1 - 6
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Ã2016., Livres DC Books Call No: QWF Fic Hen Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "Everything seems broken in Suzanna Ricci's life. Only 42, her marriage to Len has disintegrated. Her relationship to their teenage boys, Robin and Logan, is in need of repair. Now her mother, 'that martial soul, ' wants her to restore the family home in Acqua Sacra, damaged by earthquake. And she doesn't care how many trips from Montreal to their vivid Italian patria of Abruzzo her daughter has to make. At least when Len, a dodgy accountant, encourages her to take a job with a Montreal law firm headed by a man named Robert Bliss, Suzanna feels hopeful of being freer of her ex. Until she realizes the crazy cost of disentangling herself, and not just from him or his 'associates.' Old World skepticism kicks at New World concerns in Acqua Sacra, Keith Henderson's brisk new novel about private deception and public corruption. His cast includes an honest architect, a gutsy office clerk, the modern-day witch of a drained lake, and at least one (reformed) dirt-digging lawyer. But what is Suzanna to do when the mob and their extralegal cross-border political shenanigans invade her life? While Montreal's underworld seems as full of venomous snakes and mean dogs as the Abruzzo mountains, Roman history, Italian mafiosi, dutiful Canadians, and migrant African workers collide, headlong and bizarrely comedic. At the centre of the crash, stunned and sheep-like, lies Suzanna. Henderson, the author ofThe Roof Walkers, again delivers an entertaining and perceptive story in Acqua Sacra about the nature of personal responsibility, this time in an age of multinational delinquency. If Suzanna survives the wreckage, it'll be by honouring the true meaning of 'family' in any global village."--
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1987., DC Books Call No: QWF Fic Hen Edition: ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: A novel dramatizing the various and often conflicting ways members of an English-speaking Montreal family try to understand and cope with the Referendum crisis of 1980 in Quebec, The Restoration is one of the few literary looks Canada has at those formative and turbulent years. And with its primary motif of the burning of historic buildings and the destruction of a Canadian political legacy, The Restoration says a good deal about the tensions that continue to beset the country. "A good, solid novel, something rich and important...." That's what the American novelist Elizabeth Spencer had to say about the book. Wrote The Globe and Mail in its review: "Keith Henderson knows most intimately those parts of the anglo-Quebec community who have been most abused by recent Canadian history, the marginal middle class citizenry of places like Roxboro." As Canada grapples with the current instalment of its lingering cultural and constitutional crisis, The Restoration adds a special and indispensible dimension to the national political discourse.
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2012., DC Books Call No: QWF Fic Hen Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Christmas, 1864, in the last years of the civil war, a twenty-year-old Irish Canadian, Eoin O'Donoghue, is newly hired as the personal secretary to the prospective head of the embryonic Irish Republican Army in New York, William R. Roberts. Appalled that the mayhem he sees around him is also being planned for his own country, Eoin offers his services to Gilbert McMicken, head of Canada's secret police. So begins the trajectory of what Eoin himself calls, self-disparagingly, his 'Judas informantcy.'... Against a backdrop of fusion and collapse, 600,000 Americans dead, one nation, Canada, about to be created, another to its south in disarray, Irish militants plan northward raids to win a 'New Ireland' on the continent (its capital, Sherbrooke, QC), to split Ireland itself off from Great Britain, and to avenge reverse, cross-border Southern terror hatched in Montreal and approved by Jefferson Davis - murder and bank robberies in St. Albans, Vermont, a form of germ warfare (yellow fever spread by trunks of black vomit encrusted clothing), Confederate Robert Kennedy's almost successful plan to fire-bomb New York City, and the shooting of Abraham Lincoln. Under assumed names, safely housed in the Moffat Mansion on Union Square (with a sunburst flag on the roof, lavishly furnished in mahogany and green, center of the Irish Republic in exile), live the secret, illegitimate twin daughters of James Stephens, Fenian leader in Europe. Who will capture Eoin O'Donoghue's allegiance - his employer, radical New York businessman and Fenian William R. Roberts (later US ambassador to Chile), Deirdre Hopper (Stephens), accomplished painter and musician and daughter of the leader in Dublin, or Canadian spy-master Gilbert McMicken, who regularly insists his protégé provide 'less poetry and more police work.' ...Two spirits also stalk the book, one Edmund Spencer, author of the Faerie Queene and the Sheriff of Cork, who celebrated the flowers of Ireland and contemplated mass starvation of the Irish as an instrument of Elizabethan power. The other is Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Irish revolutionary, poet, journalist, Father of Confederation, the only federal politician in Canada ever to have been assassinated (by Fenian separatists in 1868), almost three years to the day after Lincoln's death at the hands of John Wilkes Booth. Art or authority, union or secession, integrity or 'informantcy', rapine and war or love and the peaceable kingdom - Eoin O'Donoghue, reluctant patriot and spy, is torn by these choices.
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2018., DC Books Call No: QWF Fic Hen Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "Sasquatch and the Green Sash is at once a translation and adaptation of the medieval English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, from a time when parts of English culture were closer to Old Norse roots. Novelist Keith Henderson has chosen to Canadianize the original and set it among the native Dene of the Northwest Territories' Nahanni National Park, a place with its own suggestive tradition of beheading stories. The rich alliterative language of the original has been retained and modernized. The setting has been edged further north, darker, colder, sub-arctic, with 'the ominous green and violet and pink of Aurora Borealis' and the additional dimension of the ancient Green Man's Muslim origins as Al Khidr, vizier of Alexander the Great. Together, in the lands where it's dark at mid-day, they once sought the Fountain of Youth. Here is much that is vivid, intriguing, and deeply morally satisfying: Sasquatches, beheadings, Turkish scimitars, caribou hunts, a young RCMP officer involved in illicit love affairs and mysterious ceintures flechees, all in the stunning panorama of Canada's Northwest where 'Magic ovals and circles decorate the northern land, interlink one with another; in secret hollows, nests, and caves, in birds' eggs and in the bellies of foxes, field mice, and bears, small heads grow and acquire their features, fleeting as a gust of wind.'"--.
