Described as a cross between a traditional book club and a university course without exams, this popular program is in-person and online for the 2024-25 season! This registration option is for the Tuesday ONLINE subscription option only.
A link will be sent to subscribers between 7:00 and 7:30 pm on the day of the lecture. The links to the lectures will be accessible from their launch date until August 31, 2025.
Other subscription options are available here: https://www.heliconianclub.org/lls2425.html
September 17 – Erum Shazia Hasan: We Meant Well
The novel grapples with timely questions about what it means to be charitable, who deserves what, and who gets the power to decide. Maya, an aid worker, must decide who to believe when her coworker, Marc, at the orphanage in Likanni, is accused of assaulting her former protégé, Lele.
October 15 – Michelle Porter:
A Grandmother Begins The Story
The novel follows five generations of Métis women through this life and the next as they navigate the challenges facing them. Their story is told alongside the bison who used to roam freely and the land itself.
November 12 - Alissa York: Far Cry
The novel takes place in 1922 on a river inlet on the northwest coast of British Columbia. Shelagh Rogers describes the setting as a "beautiful, harsh world where people hold their secrets close as they cling to the edge of the continent.”
January 14 – Reema Patel: Such Big Dreams
A savvy former street child working at a law office in Mumbai fights for redemption and a chance to live life on her own terms in this fresh, propulsive debut novel about fortune and survival.
February 18 – Lesley Krueger: Far Creek Road
It’s 1961, and Mary Alice (Tink) Parker is nine years old and lives with her family in a suburb of Vancouver. The story is told by Tink, an eccentric child, who is funny, observant, and impossibly nosy, with a tendency to blurt whatever’s on her mind. Bucolic at first, the story darkens as McCarthy-era paranoia infects the adults and spills over into the lives of the children.
March 18 –Mariam Pirbhai: Isolated Incident
When a rock, a threatening letter, and a burning Quran are thrown into a mosque on the outskirts of Toronto, religious leaders and the police shrug it off as an isolated incident. Nevertheless, the Islamic Cultural Centre is attacked on the festive Eid night, and friendships, family, and faith are tested.
April 15 – Sandra Martin interviews Jane Urquhart about In Winter I Get Up at Night
In 1935, at the age of 11, the narrator, Emir, is terribly injured in a powerful prairie storm—the “great wind” that changes the trajectory of her life. Separated from her family, she recuperates in a children’s ward. Her fellow patients are a child performer, the daughter of a Dukhobor and the son of a Jewish socialist on a collective farm.
May 13 – Suanne Kelman will lecture on James McBride's The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighbourhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows.
