It seems like everyone is talking about Jamie Zeppa’s debut novel, Every Time We Say Goodbye, a 2011 New Face of Fiction selection!
“[A]n astute and effortlessly readable portrait of a family in crisis. . . . Zeppa has fortified this raw material with a rich family history, shifting dynamics and a gentle voice that allows the novel to waft, rather than plod, as it pieces together its characters’ disparate narratives. . . . [Dawn’s] disappointment is rendered with such empathy that even the most stone-hearted of readers will be moved. . . . [Zeppa has] craft[ed] a smart, accessible novel that has put Sault Ste. Marie on the map of the family epic.” Emily Landau, National Post
“Zeppa’s fine sense of observation and atmosphere of Sault Ste. Marie remains throughout. You know its middle-class homes, cramped apartments, cheap hotel rooms; you breathe its daily life. . . . Much to admire.” Winnipeg Free Press
“[Zeppa] shimmer[s] with promise. . . . Jamie Zeppa, an accomplished travel writer . . . explores family dynamics and those emotional bugaboos—abandonment and longing—in her compelling first novel, Every Time We Say Goodbye.” ELLE Canada
“Rife with raw and stifled emotion, broken dreams and broken hearts, [Every Time We Say Goodbye] is less a quiet triumph than a thunderous tour de force that keeps you laughing, hoping and turning every page until hours have slipped by.” Heather Camlot, Sweetspot.ca
“[It] doesn’t do it justice, just to say what it is about. Better to say what it does to the reader, for the reader. . . . It grips your heart and doesn’t let you put it down until you have come to the final words. Then you are left, like so many characters in the book, somewhat bereft. I am so very glad that a friend recommended this book to me . . . this book is so very well written––so tender and even funny at times, that I firmly believe it will soon be considered a Canadian classic, with pride of place beside Ann-Marie MacDonald and Carol Shields, two of my favourite Canadian authors. The fact that Every Time We Say Goodbye is her first novel . . . is even more amazing. . . . Read this book!” Natashya, KitchenPuppies
“Jamie Zeppa takes [the traditional] definition [of family] and flips it on its head in her wonderful new novel. . . . Fabulous coming-of-age story. . . . Every character has a purpose and a place in the novel and the ending will once again take you in a completely different direction than you thought you were going. Jamie Zeppa is one of Knopf Random Canada’s New Face of Fiction authors and after reading her fabulous . . . debut, it isn’t hard to figure out why!” Reeder Reads
“A captivating family saga—full of deeply felt observations and breathtaking tenderness—Jamie Zeppa’s debut is sure to steal your heart.” Ami McKay, author of The Birth House
“In Every Time We Say Goodbye, Jamie Zeppa does for Sault Ste. Marie what Alice Munro does for Southwestern Ontario. The sense of place is palpable. The suffering characters are reminiscent of the quiet tragedy of Richard B. Wright’s Clara Callan. There is a certain small town tragic, silent, suffering that belongs to Canada and Zeppa has boiled down its essence. It is also a great read. It captures the teenage girl’s longing for excitement and the tragedy that follows such inclinations.” Catherine Gildiner, author of Too Close to the Falls and After the Falls
“A tender, exquisitely written story that aches and laughs and hopes, and never quite leaves you. Jamie Zeppa’s Every Time We Say Goodbye is driven by characters so real you nearly become them. A deeply penetrating novel.” Tish Cohen, author of The Truth About Delilah Blue and Inside Out Girl
“Every once in a while a delicious novel comes along, one that pulls you in and twirls you through its world until you look up and three hours have gone by. Or six. While there are many stories about families, what distinguishes this book is the compassionate wisdom that underpins it, the grace that echoes through it. To read this masterful (and humorous!) novel is to feel what it is to forgive and live bravely: with a tender, laughing, ever-opening heart.” Alison Wearing, author of Honeymoon in Purdah
BookLounge.ca is giving away 10 signed copies of this fantastic debut novel. Click here to get the details. You can also read the first chapter of Every Time We Say Goodbye here, or meet Jamie Zeppa at one of her tour stops.
Beautifully written, hauntingly told, Touch is a New Face of Fiction novel that in its storytelling and recounting of a multi-generational family story brings to mind Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude - and in its evocation of the mythic wilderness, Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road.
Touch will be available wherever books and eBooks are sold on April 12, 2011, but we’ve got a sneak peek for you:
Writing is a lonely sport. During the day, when my daughters are in school and my wife is at work, I sometimes feel like I’ve simply been forgotten, that at any moment they will come bursting back through the door to take me with them. The house has its own rhythm when my family is home, but when it’s just me, it’s as if something is absent, the hum of the refrigerator not enough to compensate for what is missing. The thing is, there’s something about that odd sort of loneliness that I like. I’ve spent plenty of time writing in coffee shops with headphones on to block out the noise, but mostly, nowadays, writing full time, I work from home. I think it helps that I play music when I’m writing, that the keyboard for my computer clicks furiously as I type, that I hear the words in my head, but I know for sure that it helps that I’ve got a dog curled up at my feet.
What would you be listening to if the end of the world was nigh? Nicolas Dickner, author of Apocalypse for Beginners, shares some of the songs that inspired his writing.
Five Years - David Bowie
Bowie provided the soundtrack for the first half of the manuscript. I longed for Cold War music - a weird musicological category, I admit - and Bowie was the quintessential Cold War musician, especially with his Berlin Trilogy. Five Years (recorded a few years earlier) is not only a great apocalyptic song, it also follows the rule of great films: talk about the monster, but never show it.
Music was crucial in both the inspiration for and the writing of A Cold Night for Alligators. A big part of my enduring fascination with the South is the tradition of music - running the gamut from early Mississippi delta blues through Lynyrd Skynyrd and their suitably hairy offspring (lesser mortals like the Marshall Tucker Band) into chemical cowboys like Steve Earle and Waylon Jennings. I listened to hundreds of songs while writing this book (including a number by The Protestant Choir of the Wallkill Correctional Facility and Van Halen’s Somebody Get Me a Doctor). Here are just six of the key ones:
Do you love to discover new voices and fresh fiction? Well, look no further than the New Face of Fiction program, now in its 15th year. The NFOF is devoted to bringing spectacular first-time Canadian writers to readers everywhere. Each year Knopf Canada and Random House Canada editors get to choose a handful of books written by new authors that they feel really passionate about, and whose work exhibits an exceptional quality of writing and remarkable storytelling ability. While each book is quintessentially ‘Canadian’ in its own unique way, the program pushes the boundaries and parameters of CanLit to showcase a true diversity of writing styles and settings; everything from a tale of true love set amidst the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, to a heartbreaking but optimistic journey through the underground railroad, to the words and ways of an outspoken Acadian midwife. (Can you guess which books I’m referring to? Follow the links to see if you know these famous stories.)
You may perhaps be brought to acknowledge that it is very well worthwhile to be tormented for two or three years of one’s life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it. – Jane Austen
1. I come home from kindergarten in a quivery state of awe. “Michael Pearce can read!” I announce. “He read a whole book for Show and Tell!” My eyes fill with tears of bitterest envy: all I can do is look at pictures while I wait to be read to. Like a baby.
My grandfather says he will teach me to read. After dinner, he sits with me at the kitchen counter and begins sounding out words. “C-A-T, cat,” he says, writing it out. “R-A-T, rat.” Now it is my turn: B-A-T, he writes. “What does that say?”
I have no idea. Cat, rat…. “Catches,” I guess. No. Chases? No. Hits on head with giant rubber mallet? Thirty minutes later, I am thoroughly sick of learning to read. Also, I have not learned to read. Also, my grandfather is not a patient teacher. I am in tears.
But he persists, night after night at the kitchen counter, and eventually, I can read. The best day of the week is library day. The best days of the school year are when Mrs. Smith, the district librarian, comes to our class to tell us about the new books in our library. Sometimes she has to bore us to death with the Dewey Decimal System first, but she never leaves without reading. She is the best reader I have ever heard, changing her voice and accent and pitch as she shifts from character to character.
It’s award season and people are talking - not just those who work in the publishing industry but readers of all kinds. But make no mistake: book prizes offer more than just swanky ceremonies and cash prizes for a handful of winners; in my opinion, the biggest benefit is how competitions create conversation. No matter which titles are selected by juries, many readers weigh in on blogs, at dinner parties, in their offices - Which books should win?, Which books are being overlooked?, What’s the fuss about that author anyway? - and those are valuable questions, valuable discussions.
This fall the UK’s Guardian hosted a book award with a twist - a completely different process but the same criteria: the Not the Booker prize. There was no jury: readers were invited to make the nominations themselves, by piping up online about their favourite books of the year. Guardian blogger Sam Jordison said that one of the by-products of the Not the Booker award was a “worthwhile debate about the nature of democracy and the best way of judging literary achievement.” Whether it’s the masses or an elite jury, they’re asking the same valuable questions.
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