Wednesday, June 26, 2024 at 7:00 pm
McNally Robinson Saskatoon, Travel Alcove & YouTube
Join MARLIS WESSLER and CONNIE GAULT for the joint launch of their new novels, THE BEECH FOREST and THE RASMUSSEN PAPERS.
This event will be held live in the Travel Alcove and also available as a simultaneous YouTube stream.
The Beech Forest begins with Lisa Braun heading off into a beautiful beech forest in Germany, near where her in-laws live. As she walks, she ponders the stark contrast between the peaceful forest and the notorious concentration camp, both known as Buchenwald. This wry, perceptive novel by award-winning author Marlis Wesseler is about secrets and silences; about estrangements between family members, and gaps in understanding between well-intentioned people who struggle to bridge the distances between one another. The Beech Forest looks into the dark corners of the human heart, and brings us back out into the light of day with humour and compassion.
The Rasmussen Papers’ unnamed narrator is so obsessed with the desire to write the biography of her literary hero, the late poet Marianne Rasmussen, that she assumes a false name and talks her way into the house of Rasmussen’s former lover, Aubrey Ash. In a reply to Henry James’ The Aspern Papers, Giller-longlisted author Connie Gault flips James’ story on its head and slides it into contemporary Toronto’s Cabbagetown, among the marginalized and dispossessed, people the narrator studies intently – until a confrontation on a streetcar makes her reconsider the limits of what you can know of another’s story, and how hidden we all are, especially from ourselves.
Born in Kinistino, Saskatchewan, Marlis Wesseler attended university in Saskatoon and Regina, taught school in the North, travelled extensively and has lived and worked in Regina for over forty years. The Beech Forest is her sixth book of fiction. Award winning and often nominated, her previous books include the short story collections, Life Skills and Imitating Art, and the novels Elvis Unplugged, South of the Border, and The Last Chance Ladies’ Book Club.
Connie Gault has written for stage and radio and film. Her first novel, Euphoria, won a Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction and was short-listed for the High Plains Fiction Award and the Commonwealth Prize for Best Novel of Canada and the Caribbean. A Beauty won the 2016 Saskatchewan Book of the Year as well as the award for fiction, and was long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. A former prose editor of Grain magazine, Connie has also edited books of fiction and has taught many creative writing classes and mentored emerging writers. After spending most of her life in Saskatchewan, she now lives in London, Ontario.
