About this item
Fiction. Young Adult. Disability Studies. Women's Studies. THE DISCOVERY OF FLIGHT is a novel in two voices about the relationship between two sisters, the older of whom is disabled by cerebral palsy and only able to communicate with assistive technology (she can control her computer by moving her eyes) . It interweaves the fantasy novel sixteen-year-old Libby is writing for Sophie's thirteenth birthday, and Sophie's diary, in which she discusses the deteriorating condition of her older sister. The book's title is also the title of Libby's novel, in which Libby takes the form of a hawk telepathically linked to a girl who, like her sister, is a good artist. Sophie's diary is in fact illustrated with the occasional black-and-white drawing. The sicker Libby gets, the more she retreats into her novel and the less she interacts with the outside world.
About the Author
Susan Glickman grew up in Montréal and speaks both English and French. She started out as a dance and drama major at Tufts University in Boston, migrated to Greece for a year of amateur archaeology and professional tanning, and ended up with a double first in English from Oxford University. She finally returned to Canada in 1977, after answering phones and weeding through the slush pile for Sidgwick and Jackson Publishers in London, England, to work for a very small left-wing press in Toronto. This job somehow inspired her to return to university to write a doctoral dissertation on Shakespeare at the University of Toronto, where she taught English and Canadian literature and creative writing until 1993, first full time on a short term contract, then as a post-doc, then as a Canada Research Fellow. Since then, while raising two children with her husband, glass artist Toan Klein, she has taught creative writing at the University of Toronto, Ryerson University, the Avenue Road School of the Arts, and online with Writers in Electronic Residence, and has been a sought-after guest teacher at numerous institutions including Concordia University, Queen's University, and Franklin University in Indiana, USA. Glickman also works as a freelance editor, mostly of academic books for McGill-Queen's University Press. She is the author of six volumes of poetry, most recently The Smooth Yarrow (2012) . Her first novel, The Violin Lover (Goose Lane, 2006) won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for fiction and was named one of the year's best novels by The National Post. Her second, The Tale-Teller (Cormorant, 2012) , was a best-seller in Quebec after appearing in French as Les Aventures étranges et surprenantes d'Esther Brandeau, moussaillon (Editions du Boréal: 2013) .Her Toronto murder mystery, Safe as Houses, was published in 2015. Her first children's book, Bernadette and the Lunch Bunch, was named one of the best books of 2008 by the Canadian Children's Book Centre, and was followed by two others, also highly praised: Bernadette in the Doghouse (2011) and Bernadette to the Rescue (2012) ; all three are currently being translated into French by Editions du Boréal. Her literary history, The Picturesque & the Sublime: A Poetics of the Canadian Landscape (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1998) won both the Gabrielle Roy Prize for the best work of English Canadian literary criticism and the Raymond Klibansky Prize for the best work in the Humanities.
