Cause and Effect
with Priya Guns, Dania Idriss and Vivek Shraya
Fall Festival In Person Streaming Fiction
Guns’ prose is fierce and hilarious, straightforward and cutting. In this perfect novel for any reader feeling helpless in a broken financial system, Guns takes a sharp look at the grift and exploitation our economy encourages.
Join us for a conversation on three books that grapple with cause, effect and the need to be free. The old song says “it’s a man’s world", but our featured authors centre the lives of women demanding change and the rage required to survive.
Priya Guns, the incendiary voice behind Your Driver is Waiting, returns with Hustle, Baby, a riotous novel following a family of Tamil refugees who fled civil war in Sri Lanka to pursue a better life, just for it to be up-ended by the schemes of a self-proclaimed day-trading savant, jeopardizing everything they’ve worked so desperately to secure. The system is rigged, so sometimes you have to cheat to win.
The five stories in Tales of the Mountains and the Sea, by Dania Idriss, trace pivotal movements in modern Lebanese history and the effects they have on women. Genre-bending and tinged with myth and folklore, she centres women and the choices that they make, Dania Idriss weaves together history and folktales in a way that is both evocative and chilling.
Vivek Shraya, the bestselling author of I’m Afraid of Men, returns with The Hystericals, a propulsive and chilling novel for the post-#MeToo era, set in an isolationist state where one woman’s death sparks a movement that could liberate women or destroy them all. When Sarah Munroe is sexually assaulted on campus and her attacker walks free, she publicly takes her own life. Her final message ignites a radical movement called #FreeToo. Soon, masses of women are taking up “Sarah’s Call” and “freeing” themselves as extreme acts of protest. Overnight, all women are reclassified as “hystericals.”
Books are available for purchase from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
