Ralph Waldo Emerson’s advice is this: “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” Three acclaimed authors explore our longing for connection, the consequences of our choices and the need to live life on our own terms regardless of the cost.
The Search for Heinrich Schlögel by Martha Baillie is the story of a young man who escapes the claustrophobia of small-town Germany by travelling to Canada, where he sets out on a long solo hike into the interior of Baffin Island. Soon time begins to play tricks on him. Yanked from the twentieth century and deposited in the twenty-first, Heinrich lands in a disorienting, digital present where a computer-nimble teenager befriends him.
The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis gives us one momentous day in the life of Baruch Kotler, a disgraced Israeli politician. When he refuses to back down from a contrary but principled stand regarding the West Bank settlements, his political opponents expose his affair with a mistress decades his junior. He and the fierce young Leora flee the scandal for Yalta, where he comes face to face with the former friend who denounced him to the KGB almost forty years earlier. In a mere twenty-four hours, Kotler must face the ultimate reckoning, both with those who have betrayed him and with those whom he has betrayed.
Love Enough, by acclaimed poet and novelist Dionne Brand, draws us into the intersecting stories of characters caught in the middle of choices, apprehensions and fears. Each of the tales here opens a different window on the city they all live in, mostly in parallel, but occasionally, delicately, touching and crossing one another. Each story radiates other stories. In these pages, the urban landscape cannot be untangled from the emotional one; they mingle, shift and cleave to one another.
Brand has two gifts that are incendiary in combination: a concise and intelligent grasp of the subtleties of emotion and an apparently effortless facility with language. The result is an extraordinary ability to capture the flicker of experience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s advice is this: “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” Three acclaimed authors explore our longing for connection, the consequences of our choices and the need to live life on our own terms regardless of the cost.
The Search for Heinrich Schlögel by Martha Baillie is the story of a young man who escapes the claustrophobia of small-town Germany by travelling to Canada, where he sets out on a long solo hike into the interior of Baffin Island. Soon time begins to play tricks on him. Yanked from the twentieth century and deposited in the twenty-first, Heinrich lands in a disorienting, digital present where a computer-nimble teenager befriends him.
The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis gives us one momentous day in the life of Baruch Kotler, a disgraced Israeli politician. When he refuses to back down from a contrary but principled stand regarding the West Bank settlements, his political opponents expose his affair with a mistress decades his junior. He and the fierce young Leora flee the scandal for Yalta, where he comes face to face with the former friend who denounced him to the KGB almost forty years earlier. In a mere twenty-four hours, Kotler must face the ultimate reckoning, both with those who have betrayed him and with those whom he has betrayed.
Love Enough, by acclaimed poet and novelist Dionne Brand, draws us into the intersecting stories of characters caught in the middle of choices, apprehensions and fears. Each of the tales here opens a different window on the city they all live in, mostly in parallel, but occasionally, delicately, touching and crossing one another. Each story radiates other stories. In these pages, the urban landscape cannot be untangled from the emotional one; they mingle, shift and cleave to one another.
