One Life to Live
with David O’Meara, Jenny Haysom and Marissa Stapley
Hosted by CBC's Alan Neal
In Person Streaming FictionMarissa Stapley’s The Lightning Bottles is a riveting journey inside the ’90s grunge scene… The novel is part love story, part mystery, and a sharp commentary on the price of fame. I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough!
Reputation. Job. Friends. All our stuff. What makes a good life?Join us for a conversation with three brilliant authors whose new books explore the ways we hide and the ways we are found as we forge our path in the world.
Chandelier, the debut novel by poet and playwright David O’Meara, captures one family’s precarious balance between misery and hope. Twenty-year-old Georgia is reeling from severe depression after the death of her best friend when she arrives in South Korea. Hugo Walser is bound for Barcelona to publicly confront the man he’s convinced is presenting a keynote speech about Hugo’s controversial failure as an architect. Meanwhile, Sarah, a high-end real estate agent, has been duped out of her life savings by a con man.
Jenny Haysom’s latest novel, Keep, is a timely tale of ownership and loss, loneliness and connection, and a meditation on all the stuff in our lives. Home staging is an art of erasure. Harriet, an elderly poet whose eccentricities have been compounded by years of living alone, must sell her beloved house. Having been recently diagnosed with dementia, she is being moved into a care facility against her wishes. When stagers Eleanor and Jacob are hired for the job, they quickly find themselves immersed in Harriet’s brimming and mysterious world, but as they struggle to help her, their own lives are unravelling.
Marissa Stapley, follows up her New York Times bestseller and Reese’s Book Club pick, Lucky, with The Lightning Bottles, a spellbinding story of rock ’n’ roll and star-crossed love. He was the troubled face of rock ’n’ roll…until he suddenly disappeared without a trace. Jane Pyre was once half of the famous rock ’n’ roll duo, the Lightning Bottles. Years later, she’s perhaps the most hated—and least understood—woman in music. What she doesn’t anticipate is the bombshell that awaits her at her new home in the German countryside: the sullen teenaged girl next door—a Lightning Bottles superfan—who claims to have proof that Elijah still alive.



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