This Body

Literature & Fiction

McWatt, Tessa

World Literature

Harpercollins Canada

In the wake of the 2004 tsunami, Emily, a young Canadian woman living in Spain, seeks to understand a tragedy in her recent past involving two friends, Gavin and Marcus, along the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage trail. Emily recreates her friends’ actions from that fateful summer, piecing together what she knows of their fractured relationshipa connection that stretches back into their adolescence and an event that sent one boy to jail, while the other was allowed to go free. As Emily peels back the layers of the friends she thought she knew, she must also come to terms with her own role in the tragedy that summer and with the secrets that remain.
Spanning the lakes of Ontario, the cliffs of Scotland and the dusty Compostela trail, Step Closeris an evocative and suspenseful novel that explores the meaning of identity and the lifelong struggle to find peace and belonging.

Step Closer

Literary

HarperCollins, Publishers

Victoria, a chef living in North London, can’t seem to shakeher ghosts. But when her sister dies in Guyana, leaving behind a young son,Victoria’s life changes in ways she could never have predicted. Suddenly sheis forced to confront both the death of her past and the frightening promise ofher future. 
A tender portrait of two people searching for truth, love andidentity, this is an astonishingly wise novel.

Harper-perennial

In the wake of the 2004 tsunami, Emily, a young Canadian woman living in Spain, embarks on an effort to understand a tragedy involving two friends, Gavin and Marcus, along the Santiago de Compostela pilgrims’ trail. Determined to understand their thoughts and motivations and her own role in the incident, Emily recreates her friends’ actions that summer and what lead them to that fateful moment. But Emily’s obsession with the past comes at the expense of her present -- she does not see the signs that her partner, Sam, is becoming increasingly distant, spending late nights at his virology lab at the university and withdrawing from her for his own hidden reasons.
Spanning the lakes of Ontario to the streets of London to the dusty Compostela trail, Step Closer is both thoughtful and suspenseful. With deep insight and beautiful prose, Tessa McWatt has created a novel that explores the many layers of identity, and the lifelong struggle to find peace and belonging.

Genre Fiction

In her most powerful and resonant novel to date, the acclaimed writer Tessa McWatt explores the ways in which people find love in desperately uncertain times. Against a backdrop of 21st-century east London, where cuts and job crunches and unemployment are ugly, unrelenting realities, three very different love stories bloom. Francine, a university administrator who firmly believes that she is unattractive and unloveable, is unhinged after witnessing a tragic road accident. Cracked open, she is also on the verge of realizing that she is worth something to someone. Meanwhile Robin, a young film prof who Francine has lusted after from afar, is awoken to beauty in the form of the young Polish waitress in his local café, who cannot believe that he might love her back. And then there is Olivia, Robin's charismatic student, a mixed race girl growing up in a racist household, who thought she'd been abandoned by her father, Ed. Conducting research for a law school project on what society owes the dead, she stumbles across him working in a council office, where he's in charge of burying the indigent and unclaimed. Soon she realizes that Ed is not the kind of man who would abandon anybody. Thoughtful, poignant and profound, Higher Ed is a brilliantly observed novel that illuminates the human capacity for love, and lingers in the soul long after the last page is read.

Higher Ed: A Novel

Random House Canada

Shame On Me: an anatomy of race and belonging

FINALIST FOR THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD FOR NON-FICTION&nbsp;Interrogating our ideas of race through the lens of her own multi-racial identity, critically acclaimed novelist Tessa McWatt turns her eye on herself, her body and this world in a powerful new work of non-fiction. Tessa McWatt has been called Susie Wong, Pocahontas and "black bitch," and has been judged not black enough by people who assume she straightens her hair. Now, through a close examination of her own body--nose, lips, hair, skin, eyes, ass, bones and blood--which holds up a mirror to the way culture reads all bodies, she asks why we persist in thinking in terms of race today when racism is killing us. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Her grandmother's family fled southern China for British Guiana after her great uncle was shot in his own dentist's chair during the First Sino-Japanese War. McWatt is made of this woman and more: those who arrived in British Guiana from India as indentured labour and those who were brought from Africa as cargo to work on the sugar plantations; colonists and those whom colonialism displaced. How do you tick a box on a census form or job application when your ancestry is Scottish, English, French, Portuguese, Indian, Amerindian, African and Chinese? How do you finally answer a question first posed to you in grade school: "What are you?" And where do you find a sense of belonging in a supposedly "post-racial" world where shadism, fear of blackness, identity politics and call-out culture vie with each other noisily, relentlessly and still lethally?&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Shame on Me is a personal and powerful exploration of history and identity, colour and desire from a writer who, having been plagued with confusion about her race all her life, has at last found kinship and solidarity in story.

Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Tessa McWatt's breathtaking new novel explores love and endurance in the face of change and violence, and how people find wholeness and belonging when their own identities feel shattered. Northern India, 2009. Four travellers disembark from the Dhauladhar Express at the Pathankot train station, having arrived in Punjab to attend a wedding. Yosh, 30, a yoga teacher from Vancouver; Monica, 30, the bride's cousin from Toronto; Reema, 26, the bride's childhood friend, a mixed-heritage Londoner in search of her Indianness; and Jackson, 86, who is returning to India after a long hiatus in Boston, and who carries with him a small tea canister in which he has placed his wife Amelia's ashes. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; As they gather with other guests at the traditional Indian wedding, Jackson and Reema develop a reluctant, unlikely friendship that grows through mutual need and a slowly developing trust, and together with Yosh and Monica, they embark on a post-wedding journey to the Himalayas, seeking the perfect place to scatter Amelia's ashes. As they travel together, secrets are revealed, and each of them is opened up to more questions than answers. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;These intergenerational and intercultural relationships are a meeting of the past and the future, a reconciliation of past wrongs and a possibility that the future might be less violent, less selfish, less segregated. But can it be?

The Snow Line

Daphne Baird impulsively leaves behind her boyfriend, her family, her whole life, for a new start in Montreal. Losing herself in the rhythmic roar of a copy shop by day, and haunting the sweltering, vibrant streets of the city by night, she collects fragments of histories and reconstructs other peoples’ lives. Her long-postponed search for her biological parents leads her to the diaries of her grandfather, opening a window on 1960 British Guiana. As Daphne descends into the paranoid yet lucid world of Gerald Eyre — which reveals more than Daphne could ever expect — she cannot avoid the tensions swirling around the city or her own desire for family and connection. Out of My Skin explores the things that bind us to places and people. It is a powerful tale of voyeurism, crisis, race, and family secrets that in its layering of contemporary events and personal histories subtly explores the effects and aftershocks of colonialism in the New World.

Out of My Skin

Cormorant Books

At the heart of Luminous Ink are questions around the work of words. What can the literature being written today tell us about Canada's social arrangements; about its political and aesthetic shapes and its preoccupations? The contributions to this anthology are catalytic and edgy, and they lay down the challenge of new thinking about what's come to be known as CanLit. In stunning, forward-looking essays that are deeply rooted in the present, the writers gathered between the covers of Luminous Ink consider and reconsider the literary imagination. Their work lives up to the title of this vital anthology.

Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada

BRAND, Dionne

Maharaj, Rabindranath

Essays & Correspondence

Agnes Martin was born on the Canadian prairies in the early twentieth century. In this imagining of her childhood from acclaimed author Tessa McWatt, Agnes spends her days surrounded by wheat fields, where her grandfather encourages her to draw what she sees and feels around her: the straight horizon, the feeling of the sun, the movement of birds' wings and the shapes she sees in the wheat. One day, Agnes's family moves to a house in a big city. The straight horizon and wheat fields are gone, but Agnes continues to draw what she sees and feels around her. No one except her grandfather understands what she is trying to capture -- not her mother, who asks, "Where are you, Agnes?" when she sees her daughter engrossed in her drawing; nor her siblings, who think her art is ugly. Still, Agnes keeps trying to capture what she sees inside her mind. Agnes Martin grew up to become a famous abstract expressionist artist. Tessa McWatt has written a beautiful story of Agnes's childhood and how it might have shaped her adult work. Zuzanna Celej's watercolors adeptly capture Agnes's world, including hints of the grid paintings that she was later known for, against the backdrop of prairie and city landscapes. Includes an author's note with more information about Agnes Martin's life and the inspiration behind this story.

Where Are You, Agnes?

Children's Books

Biographies

GROUNDWOOD BOOKS *

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Books by McWatt, Tessa

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by McWatt, Tessa. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

This Body

Step Closer

This Body

Step Closer

Higher Ed: A Novel

Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging

The Snow Line

Out of My Skin

Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada

Where Are You, Agnes?