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Podcast Episode 25
12:00pm

The Spirits Up

with Todd BabiakĀ 
Hosted by Sean Wilson

The Spirits Up

with Todd BabiakĀ 
Hosted by Sean Wilson
26
Friday
Nov
2021
12:00pm
Todd Babiak - Photo by Cooper & O'Hara

The Festival’s Sean Wilson hosts a conversation with Alberta Book Award winner Todd Babiak about his latest acclaimed work, The Spirits Up, an unforgettable story of a family desperate for something to believe in.

 

Benedict is an inventor whose life’s work is a clean energy machine. It has just made him an overnight sensation and his family is suddenly wealthy. Benedict’s wife, Karen, and his teenage daughters, Charlotte and Poppy, are proud of him. But there are problems Benedict is too busy to see: Karen is deeply unhappy in the marriage and contemplating an affair, Charlotte, who is dealing with a chronic illness, is growing more and more distant, and Poppy is cracking under the pressures of her social circle. And there’s another problem. Benedict holds a rather terrible secret about his clean energy machine.

 

The Spirits Up is the story of a family haunted by the charmlessness of middle age and the cruelties of modern teenage life. Part social satire and part contemporary ghost story (with a hint of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol), it is an exploration of a timeless question: what happens when there’s nothing to believe?   

 

Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.

 

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