Three hugely acclaimed talents share a taste of their latest novels and discuss the many ways we try to escape the past and how our histories follow us wherever we go.

 

Linda Spalding’s The Purchase is inspired by stories of her own ancestors. It begins in 1798, when a young Quaker father and widower leaves his home in Pennsylvania to establish a new life. When he trades a horse for a young slave, it sets in motion a struggle in his conscience that will taint his life forever.

 

Christine Pountney’s Sweet Jesus tells the story of three siblings who reunite the week before the 2012 U.S. presidential election and set off on a road-trip that will transform their lives. Caught between loyalty and desire, they search for wholeness but find something more real in its place.

 

The Magic of Saida, by two-time Giller Prize winner M.G. Vassanji, tells the haunting story of a successful Canadian doctor who, in middle age and after decades in North America, decides to return to his homeland of East Africa to find his childhood sweetheart and discovers what happened to her during a harrowing night of sinister rites.