Disaster reads
Your Secrets Sleep with Me
By Darren O’Donnell
Coach House Books, 2004
The Toronto of Darren O’Donnell’s 2004
novel Your Secrets Sleep with Me only seems
far from the real thing. In the book, a flood
of refugees flees a United States in a state
of emergency, protests are met by a quickto-
anger police force, the heat of the urban
summer is broken by a tornado that tosses
the CN Tower into the lake and, on top of all that, a precocious
group of child protagonists develop miraculous powers. But the
book, with its experimental narrative style and playful language,
doesn’t just capture the feverish nature of Toronto, but also
what it might mean to live here if we were pushed to the brink.
—Ron Nurwisah
Falsework
By Gary Geddes
Goose Lane, 2007
Vancouver poet Gary Geddes’
Falsework builds a narrative of poems
around the collapse of that city’s
Second Narrows Bridge on June 17,
1958. A miscalculation involving the
falsework, the temporary structure
carrying the weight of the bridge under
construction, caused an accident that
killed 17 bridge workers and one rescue diver. Geddes’ poems
reach closer to the tragedy by imagining it from the perspectives
of workers, engineers and family members. Falsework surprises
with its multifaceted humanity: humour, sex, art and philosophy
mingle in the face of loss and disaster. Appropriately, Geddes’ book ends with the impression of still being under construction,
continuously reaching for a better understanding of the past.
— Sarah Greene
Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?
By Anita Rau Badami
Random House, 2006
In her third novel, Can You Hear the
Nightbird Call?, Anita Rau Badami tells the
story of three women and the complexities
of their intertwined lives, shaped by
separation, displacement, loss and turmoil.
The author takes you on a journey through
half a century of Indian history, from the partition of India and
Pakistan in 1947 to the bombing of the Air India plane that left
Vancouver in 1985, leaving you to question the painful legacy of
colonialism in the subcontinent, but more specifically on the
lives of ordinary people. Set in both India and Canada, with a
focus on the effect of being uprooted, the book highlights the
internal struggle of immigrants to belong.
—Tania Tabar
