On September 1, Mary Novik, whose book Conceit just made the Giller Prize long list, and
Gail Anderson-Dargatz got together with friends on Gail's forum to celebrate the release of their two novels! Check out the conversation at: http://www.gailanderson-dargatz.ca/ and click on "forums."

Gail and Mary chatted with many folks live, and both authors "read" excerpts from their novels. Listen to audio of Gail reading from Turtle Valley at www.gailanderson-dargatz.ca/butterflies.htm

Mary's novel Conceit hits bookstore shelves September 1 and the pub date for Gail's Turtle Valley is September 8, so this is was first look at these two great books.

Here's some advance praise for Anderson-Dargatz's Turtle Valley:

"Kat's point of view is established with such force and intensity that we feel her conflicts, ambivalences, doubts, and share her experiences as viscerally as if they were our own; Anderson-Dargatz places readers so masterfully inside her consciousness. Kat is a force to be reckoned with: passionate, fierce, and sharply self-aware, with few illusions about herself and others. She and every character and relationship are depicted with piercing frankness, and yet tenderness. There are no one-note emotions or motivations here -- every feeling, impulse, is in flux, tangled and bleeding in each other, love the most complicated emotion of all." -- Ottawa Citizen

And advance praise for Mary Novik's Conceit:

"In preparing to tell this story, Novik obviously read major texts from the period. But the book is a vision of "my seventeeth century," Novik writes in her acknowledgments, adding that she has "invented joyfully and freely." The result is as delightful as Virginia Woolf's Orlando and as erudite and readable as A.S. Syatt's Possession." -- Quill and Quire.




Mary Novik was born in Victoria, British Columbia. Her first novel, Bracelet of Bright Hair, was shortlisted in the 2000 Chapters/Robertson Davies competition out of over 400 unpublished novels, and excerpts were published in The New Quarterly: New Directions in Canadian Writing. Mary is at work on a third novel. For more about Mary and her novel Conceit, please visit her website at http://www.marynovik.com/





Gail Anderson-Dargatz's novels have been published worldwide in English and in many other languages. A Recipe for Bees and The Cure for Death by Lighting were international bestsellers, and were both short-listed for the prestigious Giller Prize in Canada. The Cure for Death by Lightning won the UK's Betty Trask Prize among other awards. A Rhinestone Button was a national bestseller in Canada and her first book, The Miss Hereford Stories, was short-listed for the Leacock Award for humour. She currently teaches fiction in the creative writing optional-residency MFA program at the University of British Columbia, and lives in the Shuswap, the landscape found in so much of her writing. For more information, visit her website at http://www.gailanderson-dargatz.ca./

I travelled to the other side of the country in August to launch my new novel, Turtle Valley, at the Writers at Woody Point festival in Woody Point, Newfoundland. It was a magical time.

I read with the powerful writer Joel Thomas Hynes, and Shelagh Rogers did a terrific on-stage interview with me. I'll be doing another live on-air interview with Shelagh for CBC's Sounds Like Canada on September 11 starting at 7 a.m. PST.

Other writers at the festival included broadcast journalist Linden MacIntyre, our beloved George Bowering, the biographer Charlotte Gray, Bernice Morgan, Donna Morrissey, John Steffler and Des Walsh.

The first interview I've done on Turtle Valley is now posted on Booklounge.ca. On it I talk with my editor Diane Martin about the feeling of holding that novel in my hands for the first time (as I did at Woody Point), and about letting it go after living with it for so many years. The interview is posted on Booklounge.ca at:www.booklounge.ca/multimedia/andersondargatzgail/index.html

The pub date for Turtle Valley is September 8.