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 and Thursday 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
