Between Mountains

Maggie Helwig's stunning British debut is that rare kind of war novel, a gripping, poignant, thoughtful, subtly imagined story about the ripples that carry on long after the fighting is over, and about two people kept apart by history, ethics and human frailty. Moral, personal and social boundaries are transgressed, with tragic results - as a simultaneous interpreter at the war crimes tribunal gets too close to a journalist who reports from former Yugoslavia. Daniel is a war correspondent in Bosnia, a stringer and a loner, a truthteller up to a point, careless with everything except his sources...('all right as long as I stay in a war zone'). Lili is based in Paris, of Serbian-Albanian origin, careful, blonde, meticulous, but when she finds herself working for the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, fails to declare a fragile relationship. Helwig unpeels the human cost of a terrible war, from Bosnia to Lambeth via Belgrade, Paris and The Hague. As the novel opens, Daniel watches a dawn raid on the house of a suspected war criminal - a good father almost certainly responsible for thousands of deaths. And the story ends with an apocalyptic millennium eve.

Helwig, Maggie

Literature & Fiction

Knopf Canada

Gravity Lets You Down

Contemporary

Oberon Pr

Selected as the 2012 Title for One Book Toronto
A girl faints in the Toronto subway. Her friends are taken to the hospital with unexplained rashes; they complain about a funny smell in the subway. Swarms of police arrive, and then the hazmat team. Panic ripples through the city, and words like poisoning and terrorism become airborne. Soon, people are collapsing all over the city in subways and streetcars and malls, always prompted, they say, by some unidentifiable odour.
Alex was witness to this first episode. He’s a photographer: of injuries and deaths, for his job at the hospital, and of life, in his evening explorations of every nook and cranny of the city. Alex is a diabetic, now facing the very real possibility of losing his sight, and he’s determined to create a permanent vision of his city through his camera lens. As he rushes to take advantage of his dying sight, he encounters an old girlfriend the one who shattered his heart in the eighties, while she was fighting for abortion rights and social justice and he was battling his body’s chemical demons. But now Susie-Paul is fighting her own crisis: her schizophrenic brother has been missing for months, and the streets of Toronto are more hostile than ever.
 Maggie Helwig, author of the critically lauded Between Mountains, has fashioned a novel not of bold actions but of small gestures, showing how easy and gentle is the slide into paranoia, and how enormous and terrifying is the slide into love. This is a remarkable novel: romantically and politically charged, utterly convincing in its portrait of our individual and societal instability, and steadfast in its faith in redemption.

Girls Fall Down

Literary

Coach House Books

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