Sometimes, getting to the truth involves invention–some stories, however connected to real life, real history and real concerns, don’t fit within narrow definitions of “the real world”. Join us for a taste of three acclaimed novels that step outside the acknowledged here and now and a conversation on how imagination brings us to the heart of things.

 

Set after the second American Civil War in 2074, Omar El Akkad’s debut novel, American War, begins in the aftermath of a devastating plague, and tells the story of one family caught deep in the middle. It asks what might happen if America were to turn its most devastating policies and deadly weapons upon itself.

 

In Cherie Dimaline’s Governor General's Literary Award winning novel. The Marrow Thieves, humanity has nearly destroyed its world through global warming, but now an even greater evil lurks. The indigenous people of North America are being hunted and harvested for their bone marrow, which carries the key to recovering something the rest of the population has lost: the ability to dream.

 

The protagonist in Timothy Taylor’s new novel The Rule of Stephens, survives a plane crash, barely suffering a scratch. She hates the word "miracle," yet it feels that way at first. And then comes the late-night call, from one of the other survivors. He has a story to tell, a warning he says, about his own troubles, a life in ruins, his luck run out. And all at the hands, he insists, of a mysterious other, resembling him perfectly right down to the features of his face. Catherine has always believed in an ordered, rational world--more Stephen Hawking than Stephen King. But with her life at the brink, she cannot shake the feeling that her "Rule of Stephens" may no longer hold.

 

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