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 Thursday 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 26 – Nina Dunic: The Clarion
Peter plays the trumpet and works in a kitchen; Stasi tries to climb the corporate ladder and lands in therapy. These sensitive siblings struggle to find their place in the world, seeking intimacy and belonging—or trying to escape it. The novel captures the vague if hopeful melancholy of any generation that believes it was never “called” to something great.
October 24– MARINA ENDICOTT: THE OBSERVER
The novel pulls heavily from Marina’s personal experience working in a small-town Alberta newspaper, when her husband, an RCMP officer, was posted to a small community north of Edmonton. In the novel, the couple’s new life together is an adventure, but as in all the best stories, time darkens and deepens it.
November 28 – Suanne Kelman interviews Anne Michaels about Held
It is a haunting meditation on our need to find meaning, to rediscover hope after deep loss, to rationalize the past and shape the future. Against a backdrop of the development of photography, Marie Curie’s discoveries, the struggle for women’s suffrage, Darwin’s radical ideas, different characters play out their individual lives from the early 1900’s to the present.
January 23– Sarah Henstra: The Lost Tarot
Theresa Bateman, a junior art historian in Toronto, receives a single tarot card in the mail. The image is unmistakably the work of celebrated avant-garde artist, Lark Ringold, of the 1930’s. Its discovery would mean a breakthrough in Theresa's career. But the legendary Ringold paintings were lost in a fire that claimed Lark's life in the final, horrific implosion of a notorious cult called the Shown.
February 27 - Don Gillmor: Breaking and Entering
At 49, Beatrice Billings is rudderless. Her marriage is stale, her relationship with her son Thomas is limited to text messages and she is the primary caregiver for her mother, who is in the early stages of dementia. When she finds that she has both a talent and a passion for picking locks, the sense of anticipation that had been missing from her life returns.
March 27 - Suanne Kelman lectures on Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
The novel follows actress Sonia as she returns to Palestine and takes a role in a West Bank production of Hamlet. As opening night draws closer it becomes clear just how many obstacles stand before a troupe of Palestinian actors. A stunning rendering of present-day Palestine.
April 24 - Helen Humphreys: Followed by the Lark
Inspired by the journals and writing of Henry David Thoreau, this moving novel inhabits the life and mind of this renowned nineteenth-century naturalist, poet and abolitionist, and reveals the deep connections between his time and our own.
May 22 – Merilyn Simonds:
Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay
A remarkable biography of an extraordinary woman -- a Swedish aristocrat who survived the Russian Revolution to become an internationally renowned naturalist, one of the first to track the mid-century decline of songbirds. A Canadian Rachel Carson, Louise de Kiriline Lawrence lived and worked in an isolated log cabin near North Bay.
