Name: The Light a Body Radiates
Brand: Caitlin Press (CA)
SKU: 9781987915617
Price: 10.99 GBP
Availability: InStock

The Light a Body Radiates

By (author): Ethel Whitty

Published by Caitlin Press (CA)

In Stock

£10.99

Published: 26-Mar-2018
ISBN: 9781987915617

Paperback
288 Pages

Subjects:
Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

Quantity

Eileen MacPherson is a child of eight when her beloved sixteen-year-old brother, Francis, leaves home after a violent family episode. Over the next 25 years, everything she understands to be true changes but she never wavers in her yearning to understand the forces that have torn her family apart. The Light a Body Radiates tells the story of Eileens passionate search for explanations in whispered fragments of conversation she overhears whenever she can slip into a room unseen. She gathers a whole storehouse of truths and myths, including her own, that lead her to a deeper understanding of how people, who love each other deeply, can find it impossible to bridge the gulf dividing them. While navigating the uneven road that leads to becoming a woman, Eileens loyalty to family and home is pitted against her desire for love and art and a wider worldview. Along the way, she uncovers the cracks and crevices in her familys well-defended hearts and minds. The discovery that Francis is gay is only one piece of a larger puzzle-and when, in the end, it is a devastating AIDS diagnosis that brings Francis home, Eileen learns how love can transcend the forces of poverty and culture and distance. Set in working class Cape Breton, against the backdrop of the 60s revolution, the AIDS epidemic of the 80s, and the culturally imperative migration that urged so many away from the places they called home, The Light a Body Radiates is a story that engages powerfully with questions of place, secrets, loyalty, and what it means to take care of your own.

Ethel Whitty was born and raised in Cape Breton and emigrated from there to the West Coast in her early twenties. She wrote The Light a Body Radiates in stolen moments and occasional weeks of solitude while working for twelve years as the Director of the Carnegie Community Centre in Vancouvers Downtown Eastside. A graduate of the Simon Fraser Universitys Writers Studio, she currently lives in Vancouver.

Written with much lyricism and heart, the Cape Breton of the past comes alive on the page, with its close-knit culture, spectacular wind-swept vistas and grinding poverty. [] All told, The Light a Body Radiates is a standout debut. A sign of good things to come. The Vancouver Sun

Whitty is a masterful storyteller. The Light A Body Radiates is a touching multi-generational story that is rooted in the isolation and safety of Cape Breton Island. With great insight and beautiful detail, Whitty reveals that its only through the lost and departed that we truly understand the meaning of home. Gurjinder Basran, author of Someone You Love Is Gone

The Light a Body Radiates has all the gorgeous melancholy and raw yet dignified edge of the most beautifully played Cape Breton strathspey. With pitch-perfect detail this coming-of-age novel lays bare the blood memories of family and place that link generations through lifes hard joys and sorrows and the exigencies of individuals making their way in the world. A haunting story whose powerful, lilting notes rise and echo far beyond its pages. Carol Bruneau, author of A Bird on Every Tree

Theres a lot of these multi-generational sagas but I thought this was a very fresh take on it and I loved the female characters at its centre. Kerry Clare, on CBC Ontario Morning