About this item
To whom do we offer refuge -- and why? After a life that rubbed up against the century's great events in New York City, Mexico, and Montreal, 96-year-old Cassandra MacCallum is surviving well enough, alone on her island, when a young Burmese woman contacts her, claiming to be kin. Curiosity, loneliness, and a slender filament of hope prompts the old woman to accept a visit. But Nang's story of torture and flight provokes memories in Cass that peel back, layer by layer, the events that brought her to this moment -- and forces her, against her will, to confront the tragedy she has refused for half a century. Could her son really be Nang's grandfather? What does she owe this girl, who claims to be stateless because of her MacCallum blood? Drawn, despite herself, into Nang's search for refuge, Cass struggles to accept the past and find a way into whatever future remains to her.
About the Author
Merilyn Simonds was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, spent her childhood in Brazil and came of age in a small town in southwestern Ontario. She began as a freelance journalist, publishing nine nonfiction books and scores of magazine articles on subjects ranging from the environment to soap-making, from art and architecture to war. She was a founding editor of This Country Canada, associate editor at Harrowsmith Magazine and contributing editor at Harrowsmith, Equinox, Canadian Geographic and Saturday Night Magazines.
With the release of The Convict Lover in 1996, she became nationally known as a literary writer, exploring the zone where fact and fiction meet. Now considered a classic in Canadian creative nonfiction, The Convict Lover was nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction and was chosen as one of the top ten nonfiction books of 1996 by the Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire, Elm Street and Maclean's. It was translated into Chinese, Japanese, and German, and in 1997, was adapted for the stage by Layne Coleman and Carol Corbeil for the Kingston Summer Theatre Festival, premiering at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto in the fall of 1998. In February 2016, a new play inspired by The Convict Lover and written by Canadian playwright, Judith Thompson, will premier at Theatre Kingston.
The Holding, Simonds's first novel, was published in 2004 to unanimously favourable reviews and spent five months on the Canadian Booksellers' Association bestseller list. Published in Germany and the United States the following year, it was selected a New York Times Review of Books "Editor's Choice."
Simonds' collection of linked, autobiographical stories, The Lion in the Room Next Door, was published in the UK, the US, and Germany, and became a Canadian national bestseller. Her short fiction has been anthologized internationally and was included in a special 2009 issue of Journal of the Americas on Canadian literature and art. Her short story "Miss You Already" was published in Germany, the Netherlands, and Canada, where it was nominated for a National Magazine Award. In August 2012 she published a collection of flash fiction,The Paradise Project, which was handset and printed with a hand-operated 19th century press, and featuring handmade endpapers made in part from plants in her garden.
Breakfast at the Exit Café: Travels in America, a travel memoir cowritten with her husband, Wayne Grady, was selected a Globe 100 best book of 2010, Joseph Boyden called it "a brilliant road trip I never wanted to end." The following year she published A New Leaf: Growing with my Garden, a collection of personal essays adapted from her webblog, frugalistagardener.com. She has edited two anthologies: A Literary Companion to Gardens (2008) and A Literary Companion to the Night (2009) .
Simonds has been writer-in-residence at Green College, Universi
