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 Wednesday 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
The Virtual Series Includes:
September 11 -Amanda Peters:
Waiting For the Long Night Moon: Stories
The stories describe the dignity of the traditional way of life, the humiliations of systemic racism and the resilient power to endure. A young man returns from residential school only to realize he can no longer communicate with his own parents. A young woman finds purpose and healing on the front lines as a water protector.
October 9 – Genevieve Scott: The Damages
The novel takes place at a fictional version of Queen’s University in the winter of 1998 during the devastating ice storm. Classes are cancelled and the students party. In the midst of it all, the narrator, Ros, is blamed for the disappearance of her roommate. Years later, her former husband is accused of sexually assaulting the missing girl the night she disappeared.
November 6 – Anuja Varghese: Chrysalis
The stories delve fearlessly into the complex intersections of family, community, sexuality, and cultural expectations. Anuja takes aim at the ways in which racialized women are robbed of power and describes the strange and dangerous journeys they undertake to reclaim it.
January 8 – Trevor Herriot: The Economy of Sparrows
Nell Rowan has inherited her family’s prairie farmstead and returns there to live after many decades working in Ottawa as a custodian at the Museum of Natural History. She is obsessed with a 19th-century bird collector who accidentally killed her great grandfather and is haunted by memories of the disappearance of her mother when she was eleven.
February 12– Thomas Trofimuk:
The Elephant on Karlův Bridge
Set in Prague and narrated by the 600-year-old Charles Bridge, this novel begins when an elephant named Sál escapes the Prague Zoo. As Sál moves through the city, the lives of the men and women she meets are altered by the encounter. Each is at a crossroads, and wrestles with questions of how to live, love and heal.
March 12 - Kai Thomas: In the Upper Bridge
The fates of two unforgettable women—one just beginning a journey of reckoning and self-discovery and the other completing her life's last vital act—intertwine in this sweeping, deeply researched debut set in the Black communities of Ontario that were the last stop on the Underground Railroad.
April 9 – Scott Alexander Howard: The Other Valley
A novel about an isolated town. To the east and to the west exists the same town. To the east, the town is twenty years ahead in time; to the west, it is twenty years behind.
The narrator, sixteen-year-old Odile, is vying for a coveted seat on the Conseil. If she earns the position, she’ll decide who may cross her town’s heavily guarded borders.
May 7 - Darcie Friesen Hossack: Stillwater
Sixteen-year-old Lizzy is trapped and caught between her passion for science and the teachings of her Seventh-day Adventist father, Daniel, and her Mennonite mother, Marie. Her father, in a bid to regain his social standing and self-esteem, moves the family to an Adventist commune in BC’s Okanagan Valley.
