Described as a cross between a traditional book club and a university course without exams, this popular program is back in-person for the 2024-25 season!
This registration option is for the Tuesday and Thursday in-person subscription option. Subscription to the Tuesday and Thursday in-person Series will include access to the online lectures of same series when it is launched a week later, so if you miss a week in-person and want to catch the lecture or if you want to watch it again, you can. The links to all the online lectures will be accessible one week after the filming date until August 31, 2025.
If you purchase one in-person subscription, you can add on the Wednesday online series for $70 .
Other subscription options are available here: https://www.heliconianclub.org/lls2425.html
The Tuesday and Thursday Series includes:
September 10 – 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.
September 19 – 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 8 – 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.
October 17– 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 5 - 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.”
November 21 – 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 7 – 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.
January 16– 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 11 – 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.
February 20 - 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 11 –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.
March 20 - 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 8 – 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.
April 17 - 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 6 – 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.
May 15 – 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.
