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 and Wednesday ONLINE subscription option.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 12 - Kai Thomas: In the Upper Country
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.
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 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.
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 living on a collective farm.
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.
May 13 – Suanne Kelan 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.
