Words Worth is happy to partner with the WPL to bring authors Christine Fischer Guy and Antanas Sileika for an engaging conversation about creativity, identity, and resilience in politically charged worlds. Their newest novels explore how art can become both a refuge and a quiet act of resistance.
Christine Fischer Guy’s The Instrument Must Not Matter follows a young classical pianist uncovering family history and personal truth shaped by the legacy of Soviet oppression. Antanas Sileika’s The Seaside Café Metropolis offers a witty and poignant look at a bohemian café community finding connection and creative freedom under the watchful eye of the Cold War Soviet regime.
Together, these books open up a rich discussion about how individuals express themselves, protect their identities, and build community—especially when navigating restrictive or turbulent times.
Books will be available for purchase, and a signing with the authors will follow the event.
About The Instrument Must Not Matter
A sweeping coming of age novel, The Instrument Must Not Matter, is the story of the gifted young classical pianist Lila Rhys, who wins a competition for a coveted year-long spot with a prestigious teacher in New York City. The move to an American city is terrifying, but Lila is determined to bring music back to the family, which had suffered artistic silencing under the Soviet regime. But in New York she has a romantic encounter with a renegade female pianist and everything she knows is turned upside down, until her brother discovers dissident literature that holds the stories her grandmother had not passed on.
About Christine Fischer Guy
Christine Fischer Guy is a Toronto writer and journalist. She’s a 2024 VCCA fellow and is the author of The Umbrella Mender (Wolsak and Wynn 2014), a “terrifically entertaining read” that “keeps the reader interested partly because she avoids setting up stereotypical opposites.” Her second novel, The Instrument Must Not Matter, is a coming-of-age story about a classical pianist and arrives in spring 2026. She was awarded a National Magazine Award and contributes criticism and interviews to literary journals.
About The Seaside Café Metropolis
The Seaside Café Metropolis a rolicking comic novel set in a 1959 Khrushchev-era café in the Soviet Union, run by expatriate Canadian, Emmet Argentine. He is trying to run a fashionable hotspot while the secret police listen in from the basement. Author Tamas Dobozy called this novel a "culinary picaresque" with recipes.
About Antanas Sileika
Antanas Sileika is the author of nine books of fiction and nonfiction. He has been short-listed for the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Toronto literary award, and his books have been translated into Italian, Lithuanian, and Chinese. Buying on Time was long-listed for Canada Reads. He served for fifteen years as the director of The Humber School for writers.