2007 Fall Author Series

This is our 24th year of bringing authors to Waterloo book lovers. (See below  for the full roster). Mark your calendars and drop by the store for tickets. Tickets for the readings are $8.00.  One dollar from each ticket goes to The Record's Literacy Fund. Call 519-884-2665 or 1-888-241-7546 to reserve. All readings take place at 7:30pm. 

Knox Presbyterian Church is at 50 Erb St West corner of Erb and Caroline in Waterloo. Parking is available beside the church (enter via Dupont) or across Erb St. at Waterloo Square.  
 

Linwood Barclay    Michelle Wan

That was the thought that came into my head when I woke up around 5 a.m. one day last year. (I looked across the bed and was comforted to see my wife was still there.) I’d been thinking about a real case in which a young girl had been taken in the middle of the night, and thought, what if the situation were reversed? What if a mother and father and son vanished one night, leaving their teenage daughter behind?

What if 25 years went by without her ever knowing what happened? Did her family leave her? Were they murdered? Did she have something to do with it but can’t remember?
No Time For Goodbye (Bantam $28.) was born.

With the possible exception of the columns I’ve been doing for the Toronto Star for 14 years, I’ve never written anything quite so quickly. The first draft of Cynthia Archer’s story, as told by her husband Terry, was written in a little over two months. Sometimes, even the author can’t wait to see how a story turns out.

No Time For Goodbye makes its debut in Canada on Sept. 25, but it has already had extraordinary success in Germany, where it was released in June as Ohne ein Wort (Without a Word). In three months, it has sold 250,000 copies, and garnered rave reviews.

Back on this continent, acclaimed mystery writer Michael Connelly says, “No Time For Goodbye just flies off the page. It’s a one-sit thriller. You sit down with this book and you won’t get up until you’ve turned the last page.”

Giles Blunt, author of By The Time You Read This, says, “Barclay does for the suspense novel what Stephen King does for horror: he roots it in the details of normal, everyday life, making the unsettling events, when they occur, all the more frightening. This is a first-rate thriller.” And Peter Robinson, author of Piece Of My Heart, writes, “A terrific page-turner that keeps you in suspense until the very end. If you like Harlan Coben, you’ll love Linwood Barclay.”

Barclay is a Toronto journalist with three other thrillers (Bad Move, Stone Rain and Lone Wolf) plus collections of humorous essays (Mike Harris Made Me Eat my Dog, and Last Resort- Growing Up in Cottage Country).

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Michelle Wan is a Guelph mystery writer with two books published by Random, Deadly Slipper and The Orchid Shroud (both $19.95).  The Orchid Shroud takes readers back to the ruggedly beautiful Dordogne region of France where Deadly Slipper was set, to a tantalizing world of wild orchids . . . and the discovery of a chilling murder.

Business is booming for Julian and Mara. She has been contracted by Julian’s old friend, Christophe de Bonfond, to restore his sixteenth-century manor house, her biggest commission yet. Julian has been engaged by Christophe’s cousin, Antoine, to landscape the new sales pavilion of his prestigious Coteaux de Bonfond Winery.

Things take a horrifying twist when Mara’s workmen find a mummified baby in the manor house wall. Forensic analysis shows that the infant, nicknamed Baby Blue after the blue silk shawl it was wrapped in, was smothered and that the crime took place over a hundred years ago.

Julian and Mara are increasingly drawn into the web of this old crime. Julian, always searching for his mystery orchid, discovers that the infant’s shawl is embroidered with a botanically accurate depiction of the very flower he has been seeking, while Mara finds herself a suspect in a more recent murder, one that seems to be linked not only to the dead infant but to the terrifying spectre of a modern-day werewolf.

As sinister revelations threaten to pull Mara and Julian apart, The Orchid Shroud will draw readers into the legends and superstitions of the Dordogne, the competitive business of the French wine industry, and the breathtaking world of wild orchids. All served with a dollop of superb Dordognais cookery.

 

Many of us have a deep desire to make the world around us a better place. But often our good intentions are undermined by the fear that we are so insignificant in the big scheme of things that nothing we can do will actually help feed the world’s hungry, fix the damage of a Hurricane Katrina or even get a healthy lunch program up and running in the local school. We tend to think that great social change is the province of heroes – an intimidating view of reality that keeps ordinary people on the couch. But extraordinary leaders such as Gandhi and even unlikely social activists such as Bob Geldof most often see themselves as harnessing the forces around them, rather than singlehandedly setting those forces in motion. The trick in any great social project – from the global fight against AIDS to working to eradicate poverty in a single Canadian city* – is to stop looking at the discrete elements and start trying to understand the complex relationships between them. By studying fascinating real-life examples of social change through this systems-and-relationships lens, the authors of Getting to Maybe (Frances Westley, Barbara Zimmerman and Michael Patton) tease out the rules of engagement between volunteers, leaders, organizations and circumstance – between individuals and what Shakespeare called “the tide in the affairs of men.”

Getting to Maybe applies the insights of complexity theory and harvests the experiences of a wide range of people and organizations – including the ministers behind the Boston Miracle (and its aftermath); the Grameen Bank, in which one man’s dream of micro-credit sparked a financial revolution for the world’s poor; the efforts of a Canadian clothing designer to help transform the lives of aboriginal women and children; and many more – to lay out a brand new way of thinking about making change in communities, in business, and in the world.

Dr. Frances Westley, is the Chair in Social Innovation, University of Waterloo. She has published widely in the areas of strategic change and visionary leadership, and led the Dupont Canada-fostered think-tank on social innovation, based at McGill University’s Desautel Faculty of Management, where many of the ideas for this book were developed.
* This refers to Opportunities 2000, a project to reduce poverty in Waterloo Region, which was named a UN Habitat Best Practice.
 

Richard Gwyn

John A. The Man who Made Us (Random $37) is the first full-scale biography of Canada’s first prime minister in half a century by Richard Gwyn, one of our best-known and most highly regarded political writers.

The first volume follows his life from his birth in Scotland in 1815 to his emigration with his family to Kingston, Ontario, to his days as a young, rising lawyer, to his tragedy-ridden first marriage, to the birth of his political ambitions, to his commitment to the all-but-impossible challenge of achieving Confederation, to his presiding, with his second wife Agnes, over the first Canada Day of the new Dominion in 1867.

Colourful, intensely human and with a full measure of human frailties, Macdonald was beyond question Canada’s most important prime minister. This volume describes how Macdonald developed Canada’s first true national political party, encompassing French and English and occupying the centre of the political spectrum. To perpetuate this party, Macdonald made systematic use of patronage to recruit talent and to bond supporters, a system of politics that continues to this day.

Gwyn judges that Macdonald, if operating on a small stage, possessed political skills of the same calibre as the greats of his time, such as Disraeli and Lincoln. Confederation is the centerpiece here, and Gywn’s commentary on Macdonald’s pivotal role is original and provocative. But his most striking analysis is that the greatest accomplishment of nineteenth-century Canadians was not Confederation, but rather to decide not to become Americans. Macdonald saw Confederation as a means to an end, a clear demonstration of a national will to survive. The two threats Macdonald had to contend with were those of annexation by the United States, perhaps by force, perhaps by osmosis, and equally that Britain just might let that annexation happen to avoid a conflict with the continent’s new and unbeatable power.

Gwyn describes Macdonald as “Canada’s first anti-American.” And in pages brimming with anecdote, insight, detail and originality, he has created an indelible portrait of “the irreplaceable man,”–the man who made us.

Richard Gwyn is an award-winning author and political columnist. He is widely known as a commentator for the Toronto Star on national and international affairs and as a frequent contributor to television and radio programs. His books include two highly praised biographies, The Unlikely Revolutionary on Newfoundland premier Joey Smallwood, and The Northern Magus on Pierre Elliot Trudeau. His most recent book, Nationalism Without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian, was selected by The Literary Review of Canada as one of the 100 most important books published in Canada. He is the "almost former" chancellor of St.Jerome's University. He will complete his duties there with the convocation on October 20th.
 

Gail Anderson-Dargatz

Bernice Morgan

Late Nights on Air (M&S, $32.99) is the eagerly anticipated novel from Elizabeth Hay, the bestselling author of A Student of Weather and Garbo Laughs. It has been shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Harry Boyd, a hard-bitten refugee from failure in Toronto television, has returned to a small radio station in the Canadian North. There, in Yellowknife, in the summer of 1975, he falls in love with a voice on air, though the real woman, Dido Paris, is both a surprise and even more than he imagined.

Dido and Harry are part of the cast of eccentric, utterly loveable characters, all transplants from elsewhere, who form an unlikely group at the station. Their loves and longings, their rivalries and entanglements, the stories of their pasts and what brought each of them to the North, form the centre. One summer, on a canoe trip four of them make into the Arctic wilderness (following in the steps of the legendary Englishman John Hornby, who, along with his small party, starved to death in the barrens in 1927), they find the balance of love shifting, much as the balance of power in the North is being changed by the proposed Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline, which threatens to displace Native people from their land.

Elizabeth Hay has been compared to Annie Proulx, Alice Hoffman, and Isabel Allende, yet she is uniquely herself. With unforgettable characters, vividly evoked settings, in this new novel, Hay brings to bear her skewering intelligence into the frailties of the human heart and her ability to tell a spellbinding story. Written in gorgeous prose, laced with dark humour, Late Nights on Air is Hay’s most seductive and accomplished novel yet, and is already garnering interest abroad.

Elizabeth Hay’s fiction includes A Student of Weather, a finalist for The Giller Prize and the Ottawa Book Award, Garbo Laughs, winner of the Ottawa Book Award and a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, and Small Change (stories). In 2002, she received the Marian Engel Award. Hay worked for CBC Radio in Yellowknife, Winnipeg, and Toronto. She lives in Ottawa.

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Gail Anderson-Dargatz, the award-winning, #1 bestselling author of The Cure for Death by Lightning and A Recipe for Bees, returns with new vigour to give us a novel that is as wry as it is beautiful, and that will thrill her fans as well as bring her many new ones.

"Anyone who thinks rural characters in Canadian fiction are dull and bland should pick up one of Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s novels.... The only certainty in her world view is that anything can, and very often does, happen" (The Financial Post). That’s certainly true of her newest, Turtle Valley (Knopf Canada, $32.) which is one of her most haunting and magical. The story, of love, land and memory, is propelled by a raging forest fire that sends flames raining down from the tops of the hills into the valley below. Kat, lonely and exhausted in her marriage to a man who has been brain damaged by a stroke, returns to the family home in Turtle Valley in order to help her elderly parents prepare to evacuate. As she sorts through her parents’ belongings and wrestles with the terrible question of what to save and what to leave behind, Kat finds in her grandmother’s precious carpet bag a clue to a decades-old family mystery.

As she tries to unravel the tangled threads of her family’s past – quickly, because the fire is starting to move down into the valley – Kat discovers startling parallels between her grandmother’s life and her own. She also renews an old friendship with a man who makes her wonder about possibilities she thought were long gone.

Turtle Valley is a page-turner filled with lush description, emotional truths, and the pleasures and pitfalls of everyday life – and includes a much-loved recipe for fudge as well as twenty-four photographs of domestic objects with mute stories of their own.

Gail Anderson-Dargatz, whose fictional style has been coined as “Pacific Northwest Gothic” by the Boston Globe, has been compared by critics to John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Salman Rushdie and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Her novels have been published worldwide in English and in many other languages. A Recipe for Bees and The Cure for Death by Lightning were international bestsellers, published worldwide in English and in many other languages, and were both short-listed for the prestigious Giller Prize in Canada. The Cure for Death by Lightning won the UK’s Betty Trask Prize among other awards. A Rhinestone Button was a national bestseller in Canada and her first book, The Miss Hereford Stories, was short-listed for the Leacock Award for humour.


From Bernice Morgan, the bestselling author of Random Passage and Waiting for Time comes Cloud of Bone (Random $34.95) this masterful, engrossing story of the last surviving Beothuk, a World War II deserter and a recently widowed English woman at the end of the twentieth century.

During World War II, well into the Battle of the North Atlantic, Newfoundlander Kyle Holloway deserts from the Royal Navy. Now, hidden in a cave below St. Mary’s Church, the war-haunted young man remembers years of carefree friendship and petty crime in the narrow streets of St. John’s. Starving, disoriented and tormented by his own act of betrayal, Kyle hears a low, persistent murmuring, retelling a story of distant, far-reaching betrayals.

Over a century earlier, Shanawdithit, a young Beothuk girl, spends her childhood in a place she thinks of as the safe centre of the world. As she grows into young womanhood, listening to stories, sharing secrets with friends and falling in love, she slowly becomes aware that Dogmen are taking over her world. Each season, her people are forced farther inland, away from their own hunting grounds, back from the rich seal beaches. Now the only witness that the Beothuk once walked the earth, Shanawdithit is forced to endlessly repeat the story of her doomed people.

In 1998, Judith and Ian Muir are in Rwanda as part of the United Nations team investigating a genocide site. A shot rings out and Ian falls dead. Overwhelmed with grief, his widow returns to England and the abandoned cottage where she grew up. There, an unusual discovery takes Judith on a quest that will inextricably connect her life to the lives of Shanawdithit and Kyle Holloway. In Cloud of Bone, three stories come together to make both an intriguing mystery and a meditation on lost innocence, brutality and the power of memory.

Bernice Morgan was born in St. John’s, Newfoundland, in 1935. She is the author of the Canadian bestsellers Random Passage and Waiting for Time, which won the CAA Award for Fiction. Both novels were adapted into a four-part television miniseries, which aired in Canada and Ireland in 2002.

 

Tish Cohen & Zoe Whittall

 

Tish Cohen

Zoe Whittall

Town House, Tish Cohen's first novel was published by HarperCollins Canada in May 2007 ($17.) It met with wide praise and a film version has been contracted.

Jack Madigan should be leading an enviable life. He’s the sole heir of a ’70s rock icon. He lives with his retro-obsessed teenage son, Harlan, in a once-magnificent Boston town house. But now 36, Jack’s painting career is buckling under a raging case of agoraphobia. And when the foreclosure notice arrives, Jack must face losing the only home he’s ever known—and his only safe zone. When Jack’s ex-wife announces that Harlan would be better off living with her and her vitamin-enriched fiancé, Jack has to figure out how to deter the perky, inexperienced real-estate agent, hold on to his house, keep his son at home, and—through the tenacity of the little girl next door—finally step out onto the sidewalk.

A book with the ability to both entertain and move us, Town House is a smart, acerbic novel bursting with heart and quirky charm. Tish Cohen is a Toronto writer. Her first children’s novel, The Invisible Rules of the ZoË Lama, will be published in June 2007. Visit her online at www.tishcohen.com

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Bottle Rocket Hearts is Zoe Whittall's first novel (Cormorant, $19.95) published in April 2007.

Welcome to Montreal in the months before the 1995 referendum. Riot Grrl gets bought out and mass marketed as the Spice Girls, and gays are gaining some legitimacy, but the queers are rioting against assimilation, cocktail AIDS drugs are starting to work, and the city walls on either side of the Main are spray-painted with the words YES or NO. It's been five years since the OKA crisis and the sex garage riots; revolution seems possible, when you're 18, like Eve. Eve is pining to get out of her parent's house in Dorval and find a girl who wants to kiss her back. She meets Della - mysterious, defiantly non-monogamous, an avid separatist and ten years older. Initially taken in by a mutual other-worldly sense of rapture, they hole up in Della's apartment trying to navigate spaces of jealousy when a biker bomb goes off down the street. Their explosive beginning makes way for an even more volatile relationship that spans the following two years. Answering an ad for a roommate at the gay bookstore, Eve meets a new family of friends — Seven, homo-core sweetheart who defies all clichés and Rachael, type-A activist and motivated poet. On the night of the 1995 referendum politics and romance come to a head and Eve's naiveté begins to fade. From naïve teenager to hot shot tough girl, Eve decides her own fate.

Zoe Whittall,  originally from Montreal, now lives in Toronto. Her previous books include The Emily Valentine Poems and The Ten Best Minutes of Your Life, both volumes of poetry. She edited the anthology Geeks, Misfits & Outlaws.  Visit Zoe's blog at zoewhittall.blogspot.com, and Zoe's YouTube trailer for Bottle Rocket Hearts.
 

Saturday  December 8 in store 2:30 pm free Note new date.
Only books purchased from Words Worth will be autographed.

My Years as Prime Minister is Jean Chrétien’s own story, told with insight and humour, of his ten years at 24 Sussex Drive as Canada’s twentieth prime minister.

By the time he left office, Jean Chrétien had been in politics for forty years – and his experience is evident on every page of his important, engaging memoir. Chrétien loves to tell a good tale – and he does so here in the same honest, plain-spoken style of Straight from the Heart, his earlier bestselling account of his years as a Cabinet minister. He gives us a self-portrait of a working prime minister – the passionate Canadian renowned for finishing every speech with Vive le Canada!

Chrétien knows how government works, and his political instincts are sharp. Through the decade 1993 to 2003 we watch as he wins three majority elections as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. Finding the country in a dreadful state, dangerously in debt and bitterly divided, he describes how his government wiped out the deficit in just four years, helped to defeat the separatists in the cliffhanger Quebec referendum, passed the Clarity Act, and set out to fulfill the economic and social promises his party made in its famous Red Books. He reveals how and why he kept the country out of the war in Iraq – a defining moment for many Canadians; led Team Canada on trade missions around the world; and participated in a host of major international summits.

Along with his astute comments on politics and government, he gives candid portraits of a broad cast of characters. Over a beer, Tony Blair confides his hesitation about taking Britain into the Iraq War; in the corridors of the United Nations, Bill Clinton offers to speak to Quebecers on behalf of Canadian unity; while at home, Chrétien reveals the events leading up to the departure of his finance minister, Paul Martin. He recounts the dramatic night in which his quick-thinking wife, Aline, saved him from an assassination attempt at 24 Sussex Drive; and, with lively humour, he describes how he and Clinton successfully escaped from their own bodyguards – to the consternation of all.

Even in the highest office in the land, Jean Chrétien never lost his connection with ordinary Canadians. He is as warm and funny in his recollections as in person, at once combative and cool-headed, a man full of vitality and charm. Above all, from start to finish, his love for his country and his passion to keep it united run clear and deep.

The Rt. Hon. Jean Chrétien was first elected to Parliament in 1963, at the age of twenty-nine. Four years later he was given his first Cabinet post and, over the next thirty years, he headed nine key ministries. From 1993 to 2003 he served as Canada's twentieth prime minister. My Years as Prime Minister (Knopf Canada, $34.99), is due Oct.16. His previous memoir, Straight From the Heart, was a bestseller in 1985.

Monday  November 12 Knox Church 7:30pm $8.00

From one of our most widely read, award-winning journalists – comes the powerful, unputdownable story of the very human cost of a global pandemic of staggering scope and scale. It is essential reading for our times.

In 28 (Knopf Canada $34.95), Stephanie Nolen, the Globe and Mail’s Africa Bureau Chief, puts a human face to the crisis created by HIV-AIDS in Africa. She has achieved, in this amazing book, something extraordinary: she writes with a power, understanding and simplicity that makes us listen, makes us understand and care. Through riveting anecdotal stories – one for each of the million people living with HIV-AIDS in Africa – Nolen explores the effects of an epidemic that well exceeds the Black Plague in magnitude. It is a calamity that is unfolding just a 747-flight away, and one that will take the lives of these 28 million without the help of massive, immediate intervention on an unprecedented scale. 28 is a timely, transformative, thoroughly accessible book that shows us definitively why we continue to ignore the growth of HIV-AIDS in Africa only at our peril and at an intolerable moral cost.

28’s stories are much more than a record of the suffering and loss in 28 emblematic lives. Here we meet women and men fighting vigorously on the frontlines of disease: Tigist Haile Michael, a smart, shy 14-year-old Ethiopian orphan fending for herself and her baby brother on the slum streets of Addis Ababa; Alice Kadzanja, an HIV-positive nurse in Malawi, where one in six adults has the virus, and where the average adult’s life expectancy is 36; and Zackie Achmat, the hero of South Africa’s politically fragmented battle against HIV-AIDS.

28 also tells us how the virus works, spreads and, ultimately, kills. It explains the connection of HIV-AIDS to conflict, famine and the collapse of states; shows us how easily treatment works for those lucky enough to get it and details the struggles of those who fight to stay alive with little support. It makes vivid the strong, desperate people doing all they can, and maintaining courage, dignity and hope against insurmountable odds. It is – in its humanity, beauty and sorrow – a call to action for all who read it.

"This book is magnificent. It’s probably the best book ever written about AIDS, certainly the best I’ve ever read. I wept when I finished, not just because it’s beautifully written, not just because the last chapter tears the heart out, not just because it’s a work of such force and feeling and power, not just because it’s so intensely and astonishingly human, not just because it covers the entire landscape of the virus, but because its impact could shape public opinion as never before.”
–Stephen Lewis, former UN Special Envoy HIV/AIDS in Africa

Words Worth is donating $2.80 per copy sold of 28 to the Stephen Lewis Foundation. There will be a display at this event for  Art For Aids International, an NGO which twins Canadian and African schools.
 

Frances Itani, Gil Adamson

Remembering the Bones (HarperCollins $29.95) is the new novel by Frances Itani, who last read for us in 2001 from Deafening. Ironically, she shared the stage at that event with Diana Gabaldon, author of Outlander. This fall she will read with Gil Adamson, whose novel is also called The Outlander.

Georgina 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, 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
 
Frances Itani is the bestselling author of Deafening, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (Caribbean and Canada Region) and the Drummer General’s Award for Fiction, and finalist for the prestigious 2005 IMPAC Award. She has also published five acclaimed short story collections, three poetry collections, and a children’s book. She lives in Ottawa.
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In 1903 a mysterious, desperate young woman flees alone across the west, one quick step ahead of the law. She has just become a widow by her own hand.

Gil Adamson's extraordinary novel opens in heart-pounding mid-flight and propels the reader through a gripping road trip with a twist -- the steely outlaw in this story is a grief-struck nineteen-year-old woman. As the young widow encounters characters of all stripes -- unsavoury, wheedling, greedy, lascivious, self-reliant, and occasionally generous and trustworthy -- Adamson weds her brilliant literary style to the gripping, moving, picaresque tale of one woman's deliberate journey into the wild.

When Gil Adamson published her first two books, a volume of poetry (Primitive; 1991) and a collection of stories (Help Me, Jacques Cousteau; 1995), readers immediately recognized a unique and unusually compelling voice, one that partnered the random and the surreal with a finely tuned technical brilliance. The Outlander more than fulfills the promise of that voice.

Gil Adamson cites as her influences Michael Ondaatje, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Mark Richard. Her acclaimed short fiction has been widely published in magazines and literary journals, and her collection of stories (Ashland) received rave reviews. The Outlander (House of Anansi Press, $29.95), ten years in the writing, is Gil Adamson's first novel. Adamson lives in Toronto.

Gil's comments on how she came to write this book are found at http://www.cbc.ca/wordsatlarge/blog/2007/10/birth_of_a_book.html

Wednesday November 21 7:30pm free.
University Club, University of Waterloo Enter the University's Ring Road from either University Ave or Columbia Ave and keep to the west side of the Ring Road
RSVP to Lloyd at 519.725-5800 or Lloyd@lloydfield.com

Four billion people currently live and die on $2 or less each day. In the United States (the wealthiest nation in the world), 35 million people live below the poverty line. Clearly, as the rich become richer the poor become, both qualitatively and quantitatively, poorer. Fueled by a desire to contribute to the global discussion on how to alter this horrendous situation, Lloyd Field wrote Business and the Buddha to review “old” capitalism and, in the process, offer an alternate vision for the way in which business can and should be practiced in the Western world.

Business and the Buddha examines business practices through the lens of Buddhist thought; a set of ethical principles that has informed Lloyd’s life for almost two decades. He asks the question, “What if we took a different approach to the ailing workplace?”

According to Buddhist thinking, everything is in a state of constant change, and this includes free enterprise, or capitalism. Lloyd explains that, while we do not have control over the fact that capitalism is constantly changing, we are able to control the direction of its momentum.

Lloyd argues that the choices society has made are consistent with the unrestricted nature of free enterprise (globalization, for example), and explains how these choices have affected societies in both the developed and developing worlds. Lloyd believes leaders can change organizations for the better and improve the day-to-day lives of millions of people. How? By shifting the focus from how organizations are currently operating to examining the ways they can create good in the world while still making a reasonable profit.

Lloyd Field, PhD, is a Waterloo-based management consultant with over thirty years experience. Business and the Buddha is published by Wisdom Publications ($20.95).

 The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and Son, by Governor General Award winning author David Gilmour, is a sensitive memoir of the three years Gilmour spent with his son watching movies. Seeing his 15 year-old son flounder in high school, David and his ex-wife swapped houses so he could live with his son and help him with his homework. They both thought their son needed to live with a man.
Faced with Jesse’s boredom and avoidance of school, David made the hard decision to pull Jesse out of high school, with one stipulation; Jesse would have to watch three movies, of David’s choosing, each week with his dad. Also, no drugs or the deal was off.
David started on Jesse’s “education” right away. In three years they watched films such as  The 400 Blows, The Third Man, Apocalypse Now, Scarface, True Romance, Basic Instinct, Showgirls, to name a few. Each film was chosen by David with the idea that it would contribute to Jesse’s understanding of life and manhood, and as the three years passed David and Jesse found every topic imaginable to discuss.
This is a fantastic book about growing up and the sometimes impossible bond between parents and teenagers.

"…And yet the book is meaningful, is insightful, is valuable. On a social level alone, it challenges our notions of education, of productivity, of high schools that have fallen catastrophically behind in their capability to inspire young men. It is, what's more, a compelling, often tender account of a parent's deep concern for his child." (Globe and Mail)

David Gilmour rose to fame with his sixth novel, A Perfect Night to Go to China, winner of the Governor General’s Award for fiction in 2006. He was also known for his movie reviews on CBC-TV News.Watch an interview of David and Jesse Gilmour discussing THE FILM CLUB
 

Richard B. Wright & Stephen Henighan

 A new novel that Richard B. Wright’s Clara Callan fans will adore, October (HarperCollins $32.95) effortlessly weaves a haunting coming-of-age story set in World War II Quebec with a contemporary portrait of a man still searching for answers in the autumn of his life.

In England to see his daughter, Susan, who is gravely ill, James Hillyer, a retired professor of Victorian literature, encounters by chance a man he once knew as a boy. Gabriel Fontaine, a rich and attractive American he met one summer during the war, when he was sent on a holiday to the Gaspé, is a mercurial figure, badly crippled by polio. As an adolescent, James was both attracted to and repelled by Gabriel’s cocksure attitude and charm. He also fell hopelessly in love with Odette, a French- Canadian girl from the village, only to find himself in competition with the careless Gabriel. Now, at this random meeting over six decades later—as he struggles with the terrible possibility that he could outlive his own daughter—James is asked by Gabriel to accompany him on a final, unthinkable journey. A t last, James begins to see that all beginnings and endings are inexorably linked.

A classic Richard B. Wright novel, defined by superb storytelling, subtle, spare writing and characters who travel psychological territory as familiar—and uncharted—as our own, October is an extraordinary meditation on mortality, childhood and memory.

Richard B. Wright is the author of ten novels, including Sunset Manor, Tourists, The Weekend Man and The Age of Longing, which was nominated for both the Giller Prize and a Governor General’s Award. Clara Callan won the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award and the CBA Libris Awards for Author of the Year and Book of the Year. Richard B. Wright’s work has been published in Canada, the US and the UK to outstanding reviews. He lives in St. Catherine's, Ontario, where he taught at Ridley College before retirement..

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Sweeping from Nazi Germany in 1939 to the war in Bosnia in the 1990s, Stephen Henighan’s A Grave in the Air  (Thistledown $18.95) is a masterful sequence of stories. In these tales, dominated by Central and Eastern European themes, readers are transported across borders and into the lives of characters who have something serious at stake, people enmeshed in acts of destruction, and people redeemed through honour and grace. These narratives bear Henighan’s cosmopolitan stamp, but they do not take place in a sanitized global village. There are no stereotypes on which to hang a plot, no filtered sense of the human condition. There are stories of betrayal, luminous studies of introspection and character, and ironic stories of historical displacement.

Whether moving readers to reflection or providing engaging entertainment, Henighan’s prose is sharp and clean. Once again, he is as instructive in his understanding of peoples and cultures as he is instinctive in taking us inside the worlds that shape them. Read the Guelph Mercury book review.

 Stephen Henighan was nominated for a Governor General’s Award in 2002. He is the author of three novels and two previous short story collections. His stories have been published in Canada, the US, Great Britain and Europe. Henighan teaches Spanish American literature at the University of Guelph.
 

 autographed books available

Collecting First Editions
A signed first edition from our author events can be a valuable investment. The attention heaped on Joseph Boyden’s novel Three Day Road may point to its future value. Signed copies of titles in the first edition from past authors who have appeared at Words Worth such as Yann Martel Andrew Pyper and Miriam Toews now routinely trade at many times more than their initial cover price.

What is a first edition?
A first edition is the first printing of a book. First editions differ from subsequent printings as they are by definition the closest edition to the author's original work. Publishers vary in the ways they identify their first editions. A signed first edition can become a special and valuable book for the owner.
Readers sometimes become interested in collecting when books become important objects that they wish to own admire and preserve. These bibliophiles develop a passion for an author's work or subject area wishing to create a fine and complete collection of work. To collectors the first edition is the most desirable and valuable edition.  Regular patronage of our spring and fall reading series (and of course regular visits for signed editions!) is an excellent way to build and maintain a library of both enduring quality and value.

Twenty-Three Years of Author Events

It was November of 1984 when the late WO Mitchell read for us at Waterloo Library. We had dinner with him before the reading at the restaurant at what was then The Seagram Museum. He was impressed with the large hall there and suggested we use it for future readings. We took his suggestion and held many events there even some with a breakfast time slot. Over the years we've used The Canadian Clay and Glass Museum Waterloo Stage Theatre and uptown churches: Emmanuel First United and more recently Knox Presbyterian. On many occasions we linked a new author (e.g. Jane Urquhart in 1986) with someone more established (Timothy Findley). Almost 200 authors (not counting kids' authors) have been hosted by Words Worth Books.

Here's a chronological list of most of the authors of adult books. Many of these names are displayed as a border around the ceiling of the bookstore.