2017-18 Literary Lecture Series- Series 1 (tuesdays)

Event Details

This popular series has been described as a cross between a traditional book club and a university course without exams.  This year it will consist of two separate series consisting of nine two-hour sessions, each including a lecture, question period and refreshments. Both series run from September 2017 to June 2018.  

There are authors you will be familiar with, talented newcomers with whom you will be impressed and up and coming international authors. Once again there are non-fiction titles whose content is timely and informative, and entertaining.

Subscription cost for non-members of the Heliconian Club is $200 including HST (108122466RT0001). Please remember we sell out early, so purchase your subscriptions as soon as possible. 

For first time subscribers, the doors open at 6:45pm, with the lectures beginning at 7:30, so come early to get the seats you want and to enjoy the refreshments. We will have a bookseller from Ben McNally Books, for the first Tuesday and Thursday in September and the first Tuesday and Thursday in January. They will bring several copies of each series’ books so that you will be able to purchase books for the fall, winter and spring series if you haven’t already managed to get them. 

Featured Program

               WHEN                                      SPEAKER / AUTHOR

• Tuesday, September 5               Alexandra Reisen / Alexandra Reisen      
  • Unearthed Love, Acceptance, and Other Lessons from an Abandoned Garden
• Tuesday, October 24                  Kevin Patterson / Kevin Patterson?
  • News From the Red Desert
• Tuesday, November 7                Wayne Johnston / Wayne Johnston
  • ??First Snow, Last Light
• Tuesday, January 9                    Zoe Whittall / Zoe Whittall?
  • The Best Kind of People
• Tuesday, February 27                 Iain Reid / Iain Reid?
  • I’m Thinking of Ending Things
• Tuesday, March 6                       Janie Cheng / Janie Cheng?
  • Dragon Springs Road
• Tuesday, April 10                        Sandra Martin / Rachel Cusk
  •  Outline; Transit
• Tuesday, May 8                          Anosh Irani / Anosh Irani?
  • The Parcel
• Tuesday, June 5                         Suanne Kelmann / Moshid Hamid
  • Exit West

BOOK DESCRIPTIONS SERIES 1

Alexandra Reisen: Unearthed: Love, Acceptance, and Other Lessons from an Abandoned Garden. Alexandra Reisen's father dies just as she and her husband purchase a nondescript house set atop a natural gorge in the middle of the city. The garden is choked with weeds and crumbling structures. Over the years, as she undertakes the replanting, it stirs memories of her childhood when a nearby forest was her only escape from an empty home life. 

Kevin Patterson: News From The Desert: The novel begins in late 2001, when everyone believes the war is already won and the Taliban defeated, then leaps late in the severely escalated conflict--into the mess, and death, and confusion. At its heart are the men and women who have come to Afghanistan to seek purpose, and adventure, and danger, by engaging in the most bewitching and treacherous of human pursuits: making war. 

Wayne Johnston: First Snow, Last Light is an epic family mystery with a powerful, surprise ending, which features the return of the ever-fascinating Shelagh Fielding, from The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. Ned Vatcher, only 14, ambles home from school in the chill hush that precedes the first storm of the winter of 1936 to find the house locked, the family car missing, and his parents gone without a trace.

Zoe Whittall: The Best Kind of People: George Woodbury, an affable teacher and beloved husband and father, is arrested for sexual impropriety at a prestigious prep school. His wife, Joan, vaults between denial and rage as the community she loved turns on her. With exquisite emotional precision, Whittall explores issues of loyalty, truth, and the meaning of happiness through the lens of an all-American family on the brink of collapse.

Iain Reid: I am thinking of Ending Things. Once this thought arrives, it stays. It’s always there. Always. Jake and I have a real connection, a rare and intense attachment. I’m very attracted to him. Even though he isn’t striking, not really. I’m going to meet his parents for the first time, at the same time as I’m thinking of ending things. Jake once said, “Sometimes a thought is closer to truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can’t fake a thought.”

Janie Cheng: Dragon Springs Road. The novel is set in early-twentieth-century Shanghai, where, as an ancient imperial dynasty collapses, a new government struggles to life and two girls—one an Eurasian orphan, the other a daughter of privilege—are bound together in a friendship that will be tested by duty, honour and love.

Rachel Cusk: Sandra Martin will lecture on Outline and Transit. In Outline, a woman writer goes to Athens in the height of summer to teach a writing course. Though her own circumstances remain indistinct, she becomes the audience to a chain of narratives, as the people she meets tell her one after another the stories of their lives. Transit: In the wake of family collapse, a writer moves to London with her two young sons. The process of upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions—personal, moral, artistic, practical—as she endeavours to construct a new reality for herself and her children.

 Anosh Irani: The Parcel. The novel's astonishing heart, soul and unforgettable voice is Madhu--born a boy, but a eunuch by choice--who has spent most of her life in a close-knit clan of transgender sex workers in Kamathipura, the notorious red-light district of Bombay. Madhu identifies herself as a "hijra"--a person belonging to the third sex, neither here nor there, man nor woman.

Moshid Hamid: Sueanne Kelmann will lecture on Exit West. In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through.