From award-winning author Méira Cook comes a novel exploring the intricacies and interconnected lives of one community in a small and colourful prairie city.
After twenty years Max Binder is still in love with his fiery wife, Maggie, and is determined to get her the perfect fortieth birthday gift. But Max’s singular desire — to make his wife happy — leads to an unexpected event that changes the course of his family’s life and touches the people who make up their western prairie city.
Set over the course of a single year, Once More With Feeling tells the story of this city through intersecting moments and interconnected lives. The colourful citizens who make up the community are marked by transformation, upheaval, and loss: the worker at a downtown soup kitchen who recognizes a kindred spirit amongst the homeless; the aging sisters who everywhere see the fleeting ghosts of two missing neighbourhood children; a communal voice of mothers anxious for the future of their children in the discomfiting world they inhabit. Award-winning author Méira Cook has crafted a novel that is at once funny, poignant, and yes, full of feeling.
From award-winning author Méira Cook comes a novel exploring the intricacies and interconnected lives of one community in a small and colourful prairie city.
After twenty years Max Binder is still in love with his fiery wife, Maggie, and is determined to get her the perfect fortieth birthday gift. But Max’s singular desire — to make his wife happy — leads to an unexpected event that changes the course of his family’s life and touches the people who make up their western prairie city.
Set over the course of a single year, Once More With Feeling tells the story of this city through intersecting moments and interconnected lives. The colourful citizens who make up the community are marked by transformation, upheaval, and loss: the worker at a downtown soup kitchen who recognizes a kindred spirit amongst the homeless; the aging sisters who everywhere see the fleeting ghosts of two missing neighbourhood children; a communal voice of mothers anxious for the future of their children in the discomfiting world they inhabit. Award-winning author Méira Cook has crafted a novel that is at once funny, poignant, and yes, full of feeling.
| Published By | House of Anansi Press Inc — Sep 23, 2017 |
| Specifications | 304 pages | 5.25 in x 8 in |
| Keywords | olive kitteridge; elizabeth strout; books set in winnipeg; western canada; collection; connected stories; south african author; families; relationships; middle class; thirteen ways of looking at a fat girl by mona awad; you are not what we expected; canlit; jewish literature; women writers; women's Literature; short stories; outline rachel cusk; this is how you lose her junot diaz; a visit from the good squad jennifer egan; book club; gifts for mom; mothers day; |
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Excerpt |
| Written By |
MÉIRA COOK is the award-winning author of the novels Once More With Feeling; The House on Sugarbush Road, which won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award; and Nightwatching, which won the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction. She has also published five poetry collections, most recently Monologue Dogs, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry and for the 2016 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. She has won the CBC Poetry Prize and the inaugural Walrus Poetry Prize. She has served as Writer in Residence at the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture, and the Winnipeg Public Library. Born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, she now lives in Winnipeg. |
| Written By |
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MÉIRA COOK is the award-winning author of the novels Once More With Feeling; The House on Sugarbush Road, which won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award; and Nightwatching, which won the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction. She has also published five poetry collections, most recently Monologue Dogs, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry and for the 2016 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. She has won the CBC Poetry Prize and the inaugural Walrus Poetry Prize. She has served as Writer in Residence at the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture, and the Winnipeg Public Library. Born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, she now lives in Winnipeg. |
Winner, Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award, 2017
Short-listed, The Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction, 2017
Short-listed, McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, 2017
“Meira Cook . . . writes prose so fluid, so effortless, so vivid, you’re swept away on its sheer beauty and power. . . . Once More With Feeling manages to be both sharp and tender, tragic and fiercely funny, and wholly satisfying.” —Toronto Star
“Méira Cook has written a fine and funny novel that, like the city in which it is set, pulses with life, love, loss, and so much more. Vital and vivid characters spring from the page, grab your heart, and won’t let go.” —Terry Fallis, Two-Time Winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour
“Brimming with warmth and a wry, often surrealistic sense of humour, Cook’s vibrant narrative delves beneath the tenuous surfaces of the everyday, asking us to re-examine the ways in which we see ourselves and understand the world.” —Kerry Lee Powell, author of the Scotiabank Giller Prize-nominated Willem de Kooning’s Paintbrush