Thursday In-Person Literary Lecture Series 2023-24

Described as a cross between a traditional book club and a university course without exams, this popular program is back in-person for the 2023-24 season! This registration option is for the Thursday in-person subscription option. Subscription to the Tuesday or Thursday in-person Series will include access to the online lectures of same series when it is launched a week later, so if you miss a week in-person and want to catch the lecture or if you want to watch it again, you can. The links to all the online lectures will be accessible one week after the filming date until August 31, 2024. If you purchase one in-person subscription, you can add on one online series of a different day for $70 or both for $140.  Other subscription options are available here: https://www.heliconianclub.org/lls2324.html

The Thursday Series includes:

SEPTEMBER 14 – ELIZABETH HAY: SNOW ROAD STATION 

A witty and wise narrative about thwarted ambition, unrealized dreams, the enduring bonds of female friendship, and love ’s capacity to surprise us at any age. The novel features the characters from His Whole Life, 2015.

In the winter of 2008, as snow falls without interruption, an actor in a Beckett play blanks on her lines. Fleeing the theatre, she beats a retreat into her past and arrives at Snow Road Station, a barely discernible dot on the map of Ontario.

The actor is Lulu Blake, in her sixties now, a sexy, seemingly unfooled woman well-versed in taking risks. Out of work, humiliated, she enters the last act of her life wondering what she can make of her diminished self. In Snow Road Station she decides she is through with drama, but drama, it turns out, isn ’t through with her. She thinks she wants peace. It turns out she wants more.

Looming in the background is that autumn ’s global financial meltdown, while in the foreground family and friends animate a round of weddings, sap harvests, love affairs, and personal turmoil. At the centre of it all is the lifelong friendship between Lulu and Nan. As the two women contemplate growing old, they surrender certain hard-held dreams and confront the limits of the choices they ’ve made and the messy feelings that kept them apart for decades.

NOVEMBER 9– CHRISTOPHER CAMERON: THORNSIDE STORIES

Welcome to Thorneside. If you ’re a new arrival, the place may look like just another sleepy town nestled among the rolling hills of Lindisfarne County. But spend some time here, meet the people, and you ’ll soon see much more.

Meet a church choirmaster who has been scanning obituaries for over twenty years, searching for one particular name. Meet a former big-city paramedic who now drives a hearse for the local funeral home so he doesn ’t have to worry about killing his passengers. Meet a mysterious stranger who shows up in town and charms everyone he meets. Nearly everyone.

And meet four unforgettable women. The secrets of their intertwined lives could wake the dead — or in one case, have the opposite effect.

December 7 – ZOE WHITTALL: THE FAKE

A con artist can make you feel like the luckiest person on earth just to be in their presence. But when the jig is up, they ghost, and you're left wondering if you ever mattered

After the death of her wife, Shelby feels more alone than ever—until she meets Cammie, a charismatic woman unafraid of what anyone else thinks and whose own history of trauma draws Shelby close. When Cammie is fired from her job and admits she is in treatment for kidney cancer, Shelby devotes all her time to helping Cammie thrive. But Shelby's intuition tells her there are things about Cammie's past that don't add up. Could the realest thing about Cammie be that she's actually a scammer?

Gibson is almost forty, fresh from a divorce and deeply depressed. Then he meets and falls in love with Cammie. Suddenly, he's having the best sex of his life with a woman so attractive he's stunned she even glanced his way, and for the first time ever he feels truly known. This is the kind of desire and passion that musicians have been writing love songs about for centuries. But Gibson's friends are wary of Cammie, and eventually he too has to admit that Cammie's dramatic life can feel a bit over the top.

When Shelby and Gibson find out Cammie is a pathological liar, they struggle to understand what they really want from her—sometimes they want to help her heal from whatever causes her to invent reality, and sometimes they want revenge. But the biggest question of all is: how honest can Shelby and Gibson be about their own characters?

JANUARY 11– SAEED TEEBI: HER FIRST PALESTINIAN

Saeed Teebi's intense, engrossing stories plunge into the lives of characters grappling with their experiences as Palestinian immigrants to Canada. A doctor teaches his girlfriend about his country, only for her to fall into a consuming obsession with the Middle East conflict. A math professor risks his family's destruction by slandering the king of a despotic, oil-rich country.

A university student invents an imaginary girlfriend to fit in with his callous, womanizing roommates. A lawyer takes on the impossible mission of becoming a body smuggler. A lonely widower travels to Russia in search of a movie starlet he met in his youth in historical Jaffa. A refugee who escaped violent circumstances rebels against the kindness of his sponsor.

These taut and compelling stories engage the immigrant experience and reflect the Palestinian diaspora with grace and insight. 

FEBRUARY 15 - ANN SHIN: THE LAST EXILES

An unforgettable saga inspired by true events, The Last Exiles is a searing portrait of a young couple in North Korea and their fight for love and freedom.

Jin and Suja met and fell in love while studying at university in Pyongyang. She was a young journalist from a prominent family, while he was from a small village of little means. Outside the school, North Korea has fallen under great political upheaval, plunged into chaos and famine. When Jin returns home to find his family starving, their food rations all but gone, he makes a rash decision that will haunt him for the rest of his life.

Meanwhile, miles away, Suja has begun to feel the tenuousness of her privilege when she learns that Jin has disappeared. Risking everything, and defying her family, Suja sets out to find him, embarking on a dangerous journey that leads her into a dark criminal underbelly and will test their love and will to survive.

MARCH 14 - C.S. RICHARDSON: ALL THE COLOUR IN THE WORLD

The story of the restorative power of art in one man ’s life, set against the sweep of the twentieth century—from Toronto in the ’ 20s and ’ 30s, through the killing fields of World War II, to 1960s Sicily.

Henry, born 1916, thin-as-sticks, nearsighted, is an obsessive doodler—copying illustrations from his Boy ’s Own magazines. Left in the care of a nurturing, Shakespeare-quoting grandmother, eight-year-old Henry receives as a gift his first set of colouring pencils (and a pocket knife for the sharpening). As he commits these colours to memory—cadmium yellow; burnt ochre; deep scarlet red—a passion for art, colour, and the stories of the great artists takes hold, and becomes Henry ’s unique way of seeing the world. It is a passion that will both haunt and sustain him on his journey through the century: from boyhood dreams on a summer beach to the hothouse of art academia and a love cut short by tragedy; from the psychological wounds of war to the redemption of unexpected love.

Projected against a backdrop of iconic masterpieces—from the rich hues of the European masters to the technicolour magic of Hollywood—All the Colour in the World is Henry ’s story: part miscellany, part memory palace, exquisitely precise with the emotional sweep of a great modern romance.

APRIL 11 - CHARLOTTE GRAY: PASSIONATE MOTHERS, POWERFUL SONS

A captivating dual biography of two famous women whose sons would change the course of the 20th century—by award-winning historian Charlotte Gray.

Born into upper-class America in the same year, 1854, Sara Delano (later to become the mother of Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and Jennie Jerome (later to become the mother of Winston Churchill) refused to settle into predictable, sheltered lives as little-known wives to prominent men. Instead, both women concentrated their energies on enabling their sons to reach the epicenter of political power on two continents.

In the mid-19th century, the British Empire was at its height, France’s Second Empire flourished, and the industrial vigor of the United States of America was catapulting the republic towards the Gilded Age. Sara and Jennie, raised with privilege but subject to the constraints of women’s roles at the time, learned how to take control of their destinies—Sara in the prosperous Hudson Valley, and Jennie in the glittering world of Imperial London.

Yet their personalities and choices were dramatically different. A vivacious extrovert, Jennie married Lord Randolph Churchill, a rising politician and scion of a noble British family. Her deft social and political maneuverings helped not only her mercurial husband but, once she was widowed, her ambitious son, Winston. By contrast, deeply conventional Sara Delano married a man as old as her father. But once widowed, she made Franklin, her only child, the focus of her existence. Thanks in large part to her financial support and to her guidance, Franklin acquired the skills he needed to become a successful politician.

Set against one hundred years of history, Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons is a study in loyalty and resilience. Gray argues that Jennie and Sara are too often presented as lesser figures in the backdrop of history rather than as two remarkable individuals who were key in shaping the characters of the sons who adored them and in preparing them for leadership on the world stage.

Impeccably researched and filled with intriguing social insights, Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons breathes new life into Sara and Jennie, offering a fascinating and fulsome portrait of how leaders are not just born but made.

MAY 9 – SUANNE KELMAN WILL LECTURE ON Small Things Like These by CLAIRE KEEGAN

It's a cold, wet December in small-town Ireland, during a time of economic hardship and the authority of the Catholic Church. Making his delivery to the local convent, a coalman finds a shivering, ragged girl locked in the shed. He knows he should look away and not ask questions. But he can't help himself.

That's the premise of Claire Keegan's gem of a novella, Small Things Like These — a moving tale of complicity and human decency. Keegan is the author of prize-winning short fiction, including two story collections, Antarctica and Walk the Blue Fields. Subtle and truthful, her work has been widely praised for its emotional honesty. As one critic put it, she has "an eerily acute ear for dialogue, but her real gift is for what goes unsaid."