Nancy Huston

In Nancy Huston’s new novel the charactersparticipate in a legal hearing of a highly singular variety, unfolding outsideof real time and place. They each give testimony in front of a mysteriousmagistrate who turns out to be none other than the reader herself or himself,presenting their respective and often contradictory version of the death—and …

Dolce Agonia is a sometimes sad yet openly comic work, a moral and social reflection on our times compressed into a few hours of a snowy Thanksgiving night in a small college town in New England. Sean Farrell, the poet “with a gift for instilling discomfort,” is the host for this unforgettable evening: among his dozen guests are poets and write …

Sol is a gifted but also terrifying six year old; his mother believes he is destined for greatness. He has a birthmark, like his dad, his grandmother and great-grandmother. But when they all make an unexpected trip to Germany, terrible secrets emerge about their family’s story during World War II. Perhaps birthmarks are not all that has been pass …

Nancy Huston describes GOLDBERG VARIATIONS:"Suppose you invite thirty people to your home, people whom you love or have loved, to listen to you perform Bach's Goldberg Variations. And say that this concert unfolds like a midsummer night's dream, that is, you, Liliane, succeed in vibrating thirty people like so many variations, each at a different t …

Rena, a twice-married photographer who specializes in infrared techniques, travels to Tuscany with her father and his second wife. As the trip progresses, in an internal dialogue with her mental double, Rena submits her past to exposure. Using dark room techniques she reevaluates her explosive sexual coming of age, her relationships with her father …

Instruments of Darkness is the story of Nada, a divorced American writerwho begins to come to terms with her past through research ofanother woman's life. Barbe Durand, a courageous young Frenchmaidservant from the 1700s, is the woman Nada is researching.Setting out to give Barbe's story life, Nada ends up sharing herown life story, one of an alcoh …

To write Jocasta Regina, Nancy Huston slipped into the two fables of Oedipus and gave a voice to Oedipus Rex’s wife, Jocasta, who has been silent for more than two thousand years. She shows us a Jocasta amidst her own people. Jocasta the wife, the mother of four children, the queen, she who cares for a city struck by plague. She is passionately i …

Longings and Belongings is a collection of twenty-four essays published by Nancy Huston, in English or French or both, over the past two decades (1981-2002). They can be seen as milestones on her path as novelist and expatriate, mother and intellectual, dreamer and realist, body and soul. In these non-fiction pieces, Huston discusses a number of au …

A brilliant series of essays examining the life and language of cultural exile.

Paula inherits fragments of her grandfather Paddock's journal, which leads her on a journey of the heart and mind where she must recreate her ancestor's troubled history. This epic tale draws readers through the early frontier's hardships, through the Great War and the Depression and into the booming 1950s. Plainsong evokes the tale of four generat …

A baby is born prematurely, and her mother sits at the beside willing her to live. Prodigy is an utterly unforgettable novella which traces the course of young Maya's life as a brilliant child--loved and loving--and musical progidy. Nancy Huston, whose The Mark of the Angel was superbly reviewed and shortlisted for the Giller Prize, once again pres …

Slow Emergencies conveys an irresistible impulse tocreate, and illustrates the emotional turmoil that ensues for Lin andher family. Nancy Huston, award-winning author of The Mark of the Angel,writes brilliantly here about the passage of time, the body’svulnerability, and the solitude of creative endeavor. What results is adeeply felt novel that o …

The stunning American debut of an internationally acclaimed writer, The Mark of an Angel is a haunting and unforgettable tale of three lives woven together by fate.

The year is 1957, and the place is Paris, where the psychic wounds of World War II have barely begun to heal, and the Algerian War is about to escalate. Saffie, an emotionally damaged yo …

To be human is to have a story and to tell stories – an ‘I’ only comes into being thanks to the ‘we’s’ which, through stories, we are taught to identify with and relate to.Each and every detail of our precious identities, from our names to our birthdates to our family histories to our national identities to our religions, is part of a s …