First Fictions

Twelve stories that provide startling glimpses of contemporary life in Bombay, and elsewhere. An innocuous jazz concert that awakens painful memories for a middle-aged caregiver, a wealthy business woman compelled by the desire to hurt her best friend, a lonely, old woman in a Tokyo apartment who seeks the touch of a baby?s hand. Tales about friendship and repulsion, family ties and freedom; violence, public and private; ambition and uncertainty, alienation and acceptance, growing up and growing old.

Songwriter Michel Laflamme is stuck in traffic on Montreal's Jacques Cartier Bridge. While waiting for police to try to talk down a potential suicide, Michel turns on the radio and hears his wife, Bijou, founding member of Beaupré, the seminal Quebec folk-rock group. The music takes Michel across a 30-year span of memory, through the emotional and political upheavals of his own life and that of his Belle Province.

A Tale of Beauty is the story of the relationships between five young women, united in their disappointment with (and, in some cases, hatred of) men as the Ugly Sisterhood: Denise, an aspiring writer whose pragmatism has led her to the relative security of the office cubicle; Chastity, a devout Catholic who has made it her mission to save her brother from what she sees as a dissolute lifestyle; Sue, avenging an ancient heartbreak by returning the favour to as many men as she can; Diana, with unreasonably high standards making it impossible for her to relate to the important people in her life; and Belle, who has brought these women together as Sisters under the pretence that they might help each other to work through their pain.

A story of mean drunks and happy ones, and of the women who often outlive them, My Grandmother's Pill is a rollercoaster ride through three generations of abuse and addiction. On the heels of divorce, Maude's relationship with Seamus sets the scene for her struggle to break free.

In this, her second book, Catherine Black weaves together the wonder, heartache, and 'unlovely beauty' of a youth that is by turns charmed and disquieting. Straddling genres of memoir, prose, and poetry, A Hard Gold Thread delights in the layering of keenly observed moments, in the subtle play of remembering and forgetting, and in the shift in perspective brought to bear on memory as it is transmuted by time. Reverent, sensitively rendered, and sometimes tongue in cheek, A Hard Gold Thread is an unconventional memoir inviting the reader into a meditation on the engulfing beauty of the world and the compulsion to turn away from it.