For Adults
Join us for an evening with Catherine Bush and Amanda Leduc in conversation about their latest releases, Skin by Catherine Bush and Wild Life by Amanda Leduc.
Presented in partnership with Words Worth Books.
Catherine Bush is the author of five novels, including the widely acclaimed Blaze Island, Accusation, and The Rules of Engagement. Her nonfiction has appeared in numerous publications including The Globe and Mail, The New York Times Magazine, Brick and Canadian Notes & Queries. She is a professor at the University of Guelph and was a 2024 Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society.
Amanda Leduc is a disabled writer whose last novel, The Centaur's Wife, is "an exquisite magical world, perfectly rendered, for [a] dark and wonderful story about the dream life of outsiders and the disabled" (Heather O'Neill). Her non-fiction book Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space was nominated for the 2020 Governor General’s Award. Her essays and stories have appeared across Canada, the US, the UK and Australia, and she speaks regularly across North America on accessibility and the role of disability in storytelling. Amanda holds a Master's degree in Creative Writing from the University of St. Andrews. She has cerebral palsy and presently makes her home in Hamilton where she lives with a very lovable dog named Sitka, who once ate and peed on a manuscript. (Everyone’s a critic, it seems.). Her new novel, WILD LIFE is coming in mid-March.
In Skin, Catherine Bush plunges into the vortex of all that shapes us. Summoning relationships between the human and more-than-human, she explores a world where touch and intimacy are both desirable and fraught.
Ranging from the realistic to the speculative, Bush’s stories tackle the condition of our restless, unruly world amidst the tumult of viruses, climate change, and ecological crises. Here, she brings to life unusual and perplexing intimacies: a man falls in love with the wind; a substitute teacher’s behaviour with a student brings unforeseen risks; a woman becomes fixated on offering foot washes to strangers.
Bold, vital, and unmistakably of the moment, Skin gives a charged and animating voice to the question of how we face the world and how, in the process, we discover tenderness and allow ourselves to be transformed.
WILD LIFE is magical realism, full of wonder and imagination. Amanda Leduc’s dazzling new novel follows two walking, talking hyenas as they interact with humans over decades. Blurring the line between human and animal, these strange messengers reveal what is possible when the cages that contain us are broken.
In 19th-century Scotland, young Josiah is banished by his father for seeing the divine in the animals around him and sent to Siberia with a small Christian mission to purge such nonsense from his soul. Miserably scrubbing the chapel floor one night, Josiah is visited by what he thinks is God in animal form. When his saviours, a hyena and her mate, rescue him from a natural disaster that kills the other missionaries and then bring him safely home, he founds a religion based on his belief that God granted speech to the hyenas as part of a divine plan to heal and exalt the human race. The hyena pair, Barbara and Kendrith, aren't so sure that Josiah has it right. But with their beautiful strangeness, they utterly transform the people they encounter over succeeding generations. As Josiah's church gathers adherents, more and more animals start to speak to humans—from signing baby gorillas to seductive alligators. At first one or two rebellious pets make a break for freedom, but then comes a mass exodus of all animals held captive, forcing people to contend with a wildness in themselves they have spent millennia denying.
The end of this remarkable fairytale is both joyful and devastating, completely dissolving the boundary between what's "human" and what's "animal." WILD LIFE is a breathtaking leap in Amanda Leduc's melding of social, environmental and disability justice themes with fantasy and folklore. A wild ride that is both entertaining and profound—Life of Pi on steroids—the novel features many disabled characters and LGBTQ+ themes, and will appeal in particular to disability justice seekers, the neurodiversity movement, and the Deaf community.
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Programmer: Nancy
Located at the RIM Park Manulife Sportsplex, the Eastside Branch boasts specialized creative spaces, quiet study areas, a nature education space and lots of natural light.
