Lovers in A Dangerous Time
with Nyla Matuk, Damian Barr and Marina Nemat
Fall Festival In Person Streaming Fiction History
A moving meditation on art, love and home … Barr mingles comedy and tragedy with wonderful fluidity.
Join us for a conversation about three books that examine the power and cost of love in a world indifferent–even hostile–to the very bonds that give life meaning.
Leila and Khaled by Nyla Matuk is a decolonial vacation romance between two Palestinians?one raised in exile, the other rooted on the land?searching for home in each other. Leila, a Palestinian Canadian film scholar, joins a delegation of academics on her first journey to Occupied Palestine. What begins as an intellectual pilgrimage becomes an intimate, destabilizing return to an ancestral land her family was exiled from. There, she meets Khaled?a younger Palestinian man who pulls her into a mesmeric trance of desire, curiosity, and confrontation. Their brief charged affair unfolds in a landscape shaped by rupture and resistance, each of them bearing different inheritances of the same loss.
The Two Roberts by Damian Barr reimagines one of the most passionate love stories of modern British art. Scotland, 1933. On his first day at the Glasgow School of Art, Bobby MacBryde meets another Robert, a quiet man with loose dark curls?and never leave his side. Together they will spend every penny and every minute devouring Glasgow?its botanical gardens, the Barras market, a whole hidden city?all the while loving each other behind closed doors. With the world on the brink of war, their unrivalled talent will take them to Paris, Rome, London. They will become stars as the bombs fall, hosting wild parties with the likes of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and Elizabeth Smart. But the brightest stars burn fastest.
Mistress of the Persian Boarding House by Marina Nemat was inspired by the life of her paternal grandmother. Born into the elegant comfort of upper-class Russian society at the turn of the twentieth century, Zina yearns for independence and a life she can call her own. After the Bolsheviks topple the Czarist government, they escape to Tehran, where tragedy strikes again. At a modest boarding house, Zina must start over. There she meets women from Russia and Iran-outsiders like her, seeking refuge. They support one another through childbirth, illness, political unrest, and a pandemic. Amid the turmoil, Zina meets Reza Khan, future shah of Iran. Their relationship becomes a welcome escape, enduring decades of hardship and sorrow before culminating in a heart-wrenching climax.
Books are available for purchase from our friends at Perfect Books.
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