Sea Change
with Margaret Sweatman, Ayad Akhtar and Michelle Good
Hosted by Sara Power
Fall Festival In Person Streaming Fiction
Eliza Sunshine is a beautiful and painful story that moves across a landscape of extermination, hunger, and a genocide that few people know. It is a should-read for those who want to know more and a must-read for First Nations so we never forget.
Join us for a conversation on the choices and experiences that change us deeply and forever shift our perspectives, with three remarkable writers whose celebrated novels explore violence, agency and the countless unspoken truths that haunt modern life.
Night Birds by Margaret Sweatman is a thriller, whose morally complex characters are called upon to reckon with the power than runs beneath their feet and the consequences of their own complicity. A catastrophe on a mountain in Transylvania sends toxic cyanide hurtling through rivers and streams, destroying an ecosystem and killing hundreds. As the impact of the mining breach stretches beyond the country’s borders, it ensnares Farrar and Clio, a couple living on another continent, who begin to understand that their business interests are intertwined with enterprises more sinister than they’d realized.
A mysterious accident along a country road sparks an awakening and an investigation in Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and acclaimed novelist Ayad Akhtar’s latest, The Radiance. When a hit-and-run shatters more than his body, a writer is plunged into a spiritual awakening he can’t tell from madness. In its grip, he’s drawn to a brilliant campus colleague by an uncanny pull, and into a scandal that threatens to destroy them both. What begins as a provocative portrait of academic and cultural warfare deepens into erotic entanglement, the exposure of a family secret, and the mystery surrounding the narrator’s accident—both the violence and its aftermath.
From Michelle Good, the award-winning and bestselling author of Five Little Indians comes Eliza Sunshine, a powerful family saga following three generations of Cree women and the storytelling tradition that connects them to each other. When Eliza comes home from her first year at residential school, her Nôhkom, Swan leads her on long walks through prairie grasses, harvesting medicines, certain that the power of the land will heal her. And as they walk, Swan shares stories of her own suffering. Decades later, Eliza and her daughter are at a crossroads. Ella must decide how to build her life in the aftermath of tragedy and navigate how best to keep the stories of her family alive when the world around her seems to want them buried along with the legions of the missing and the dead.
Books are available for purchase from our friends at Perfect Books.
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