“Rich, imaginative. . . . One of the best novels I’ve read all year.”—Ross King, author of Leonardo and the Last Supper
A sensuous, heartbreaking novel about art, beauty, and the choices we make that define us for life.
In 1968 a young man travels to Paris, where a series of unlikely events takes him to a tiny village in Italy—and to the one great love of his life. A marble merchant meets a couple on their honeymoon, introducing them to the sensual beauty of Carrara. An Italian woman arrives in Canada to find the father she never knew. A terrible accident in a marble quarry changes the course of a young boy’s life and, ultimately, sets in motion each of these stories, which David Macfarlane masterfully shapes into a magnificent whole.
“A beautifully written, complex, and bittersweet story that spans continents and eras.”—Daphne Kalotay, author of Russian Winter and Sight Reading

The Figures of Beauty: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

MACFARLANE, David

United States

Harper-perennial

Moving from Paris to Italy to North America, a sensuous, heartbreaking novel about art, beauty, star-crossed lovers, and the choices that define our lives, from the award-winning author of Summer Gone.
A young man arrives in Paris in 1968, where a series of unlikely events lead him to a tiny village in Italy—and to the great love of his life. A marble merchant meets a couple on their honeymoon, introducing them to the sensual beauty of Carrara. An Italian woman travels to Canada on an odyssey to find the father she never knew. A terrible accident in a marble quarry changes the course of a young boy’s life and, ultimately, sets in motion each of these stories, which David Macfarlane masterfully chisels into a magnificent whole.
Oliver Hughson falls in love with wild, bohemian Anna over the course of one glorious summer in Italy. Bound by a sense of responsibility to his adoptive parents, he leaves her and returns home—an act he will regret for the rest of his life. Through luck or fate, Oliver had found the woman with whom he was meant to be. And now he must try to find his way back to her.
Narrated by the daughter Oliver never knew he had, The Figures of Beauty is a love story of mythic proportions that reminds us of the powerful bond that can connect two people indelibly across oceans and time.

Literary

Harper

Nominated for the 1999 Giller Prize and winner of the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Prize, Summer Gone is set among the islands and lakes of Canada's cottage country. Narrated by Eric Schneider, a familiar voice to CBC listeners for his radio work, it tells the stories of three generations of lost summers and of the characters that inhabited them: the girl in the blue bathing suit, the impenetrable and doomed camp councillor; the wife who comes alive to the rhythms of a cottage summer but who remains blind to the secret that will change her life irrevocably. The primary story is that of a divorced father and his young son, separated by estrangement and how the silence is broken.

Summer Gone : A Novel

Contemporary

ABACUS +

The author traces the history of his mother's family in Newfoundland, portraying the events of everyday life and relating major episodes in Newfoundland's past that had a profound effect on his family

Come from away

Biographies & Memoirs

SCRIBNER'S.

Inspired by history, Story of a Nation is a beautifully illustrated collection of original stories from some of Canada's most celebrated and best-loved authors. Twelve of the country's finest writers, including Margaret Atwood, Roch Carrier, Timothy Findley, Antonine Maillet, Alberto Manguel and Michael Turner, when presented with the question, What are the great events in Canadian history responded by travelling into the past to discover the moments, both familiar and unexpected, that shaped our nation.Drawing on their skills as master storytellers, the contributors to this collection offer wonderfully imaginative accounts of what it's like to make history. Margaret Atwood casts her eye back to 1759 and brilliantly captures the journal entries of a frightened French woman, trapped in Québec City as the English forces attack. In "The First of July," David Macfarlane's youthful narrator loses himself in the papers of an elderly neighbour, and through the records of her past, experiences the heartbreaking, stunting loss of war. In Thomas King's hilarious story, "Where the Borg Are," a young boy named Milton Friendlybear offers a Star Trekkian reinterpretation of the Indian Act, linking its significance to the fate of the universe. And revisiting an occasion of huge national pride, Michelle Berry tells the story of a four-year-old girl caught up in the excitement of the 1972 Summit Series, hopeful that the passion of hockey will hold her crumbling family together.

Story Of A Nation - Defining Moments In Our History

History

SAUL, John Ralston

BRAND, Dionne

Niedzviecki, Hal

Carrier, Roch

Berry, Michelle

Maillet, Antonine

ATWOOD,MARGARET

FINDLEY, Timothy

MANGUEL, Alberto

King,Thomas

and Turne

Americas

Doubleday, Canada

Likeness: Fathers, Sons, a Portrait

Self-Help

Death & Grief

David Macfarlane’s Summer Gone introduces a writer of incandescent literary skill and beautifully evokes the sometimes painful relationship between father and son. When Bay Newby is twelve he is sent north for the first time, and he falls in love with the life of ritual, beauty, and stark privilege of summer camp. Then the death of his baby sister calls him home, and it will be twenty-three years before his next “perfect summer.” The summer he spends with his young son will contain loss also, but also discovery and redemption.Summer Gone is a novel of layered experience, of life, death and love as seen through the eyes of a young boy as he grows into a wiser–and more haunted–man.

Summer Gone: A Novel

Anchor

Canadian best-selling author David Macfarlane has written a masterful first novel about love experienced and love remembered that flickers with fleeting passions and sudden tragedies, offering an elegy not only for the ephemeral beauty of northern summers but for an entire era. Summer Gone is about that moment when everything stops. Like skilled canoeists, we briefly hold a perfect balance -- poised between innocence and experience, life and death, discovery and loss, the promise of spring and the melancholy of autumn. Set among the islands and lakes of "cottage country," this beautifully crafted novel from one of Canada's premier writers explores the stories of three generations of lost summers: the girl in the blue bathing suit; the impenetrable and doomed camp counselor with the shifting features; the wife who comes alive to the rhythms of a cottage summer, wild blueberries, and lake gossip, though who remains blind to the secret that will change her life irrevocably. But the beating heart of this novel lies in the story of a divorced father and a young son separated by the silence of estrangement, and how during one extraordinary night on an ill-fated canoe trip the silence is broken. As the story unfolds and the mystery unravels, tragedy looms over father and son in ways they could never have imagined, and leads to the novel's gripping and startling conclusion. Graced by a spare beauty of language and a deeply humane intelligence and wit, Summer Gone is an exquisite novel.

Summer Gone

Crown

Come from Away

Simon&Schuster

Knopf Canada

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