Esta Spalding

Kim Fitzgerald-Trout took to driving with ease--as most children would if their parents would ever let them try. She had to. After all, she and her siblings live in a car. Meet the Fitzgerald-Trouts, a band of four loosely related children living together in a lush tropical island. They take care of themselves. They sleep in their car, bathe in the ocean, eat fish they catch and fruit they pick, and can drive anywhere they need to go--to the school, the laundromat, or the drive-in. If they put their minds to it, the Fitzgerald-Trouts can do anything. Even, they hope, find a real home. Award-winning poet and screenwriter Esta Spalding's exciting middle grade debut establishes a marvelous place where children fend for themselves, and adults only seem to ruin everything. This extraordinary world is brought to vibrant life by Sydney Smith, the celebrated artist behind Sidewalk Flowers.

Look Out for the Fitzgerald-Trouts

In this second installment, the delightfully self-reliant siblings continue their search for a home. This time, their pursuit will bring them face-to-face with a flood, illegal carnivorous plants, and the chance to win an extraordinary prize at a carnival. Will they finally find the place they truly belong?

Knock about with the Fitzgerald-Trouts

Linda Spalding

Persephone revisited: a unique mother-and-daughter story written by amother-and-daughterliterary team Mere’s young life is confined to the wind and water, the boat that shelives on docking only long enough to stop at the grocery store orvisit the library, but never long enough to take out any books. Thatwould mean having a library card, and a library card would meanrevealing your name on a government form. Mere, her mother, Faye, and Mark, the mysterious teenage runawaywho shares their boat, seem destined to sail around the Great Lakesforever, navigating the Persephone through the deep waters, stoppingin Toronto twice a year to pick up envelopes of cash left with thedockmaster. Faye is a fugitive, still pursued for her part in the violentone-year anniversary events marking Chicago’s 1968 “Days ofRage”—a seminal student protest against the Vietnam war. NowMerril, Mere’s father, has suddenly appeared on the boat after manyyears. The authorities are looking for him and Faye is his ticket tofreedom. But, in a desperate bid for her own adolescent freedom,Mere makes a choice that will change everything. Mere is a wonderfully electric novel about the inexorable bondbetween mothers and daughters, written by two of Canada’s mosttalented writers—themselves mother and daughter. Rich in itsallegorical and sociological strands, it reaches into the Greek myth ofPersephone; it explores a woman’s primeval need to protect herchild; and it lays bare the explosive events of a touchstone period inour history. A novel of choices and consequences, betrayal andatonement, Mere builds lyrically to a shattering climax, an endingthat haunts long after the last page is turned.

Mere Tpb

In The Wife's Account, Esta Spalding unflinchingly explores the mysterious and arbitrary losses that occur within love. These poems chart the course of a marriage from winter's end through spring and summer to the first days of fall, bringing to life the peculiar inhabitants of a neighbourhood: a woman with a metal detector who searches for treasure, a pregnant skunk and a one-eyed mouse, a group of nudists, the elderly Mrs. Barlowe and her plum tree. Drawing on the historical figures of Pharaoh Ramses II and his wife, Nefertari, on Lady Diana Spencer, and on the character Alicia, the wife and spy from Hitchcock's Notorious, The Wife's Account is Spalding's strangest and boldest collection to date. It is a book of transformations -- both real and mythological -- of seasons, of relationships, of life and death; a book in which grief dissolves, absence becomes presence, and loss leads to recovery; a collection both intimate and harrowing.

Poems

The Wife's Account

The third book in a Dahl-esque middle-grade series by award-winning poet and screenwriter Esta Spalding. The plucky Fitzgerald-Trout siblings (who live on a tropical island where the grown-ups are useless but the kids can drive) are back! After losing the boat that had become their home, oldest Fitzgerald-Trout, Kim, has put finding a home back on her to-do list. When her sixth-grade history assignment offers a clue about the ruins of a volcanic house built by an explorer on Mount Muldoon, she and her siblings set out to find it. The castle they discover surpasses their wildest dreams. But having a permanent home offers more challenges than the Fitzgerald-Trouts expect, especially when they begin to suspect their home is haunted. The siblings must figure out how to fix the cracks in their family foundation before one of them is lost for good.

Shout Out for the Fitzgerald-Trouts

Awake before dawn a year after his lover Helen's death, Peter H. begins to assemble his memories of her. How to conjure the dead? How to put a lover's body together again? Working through the winter, spring, and into the late summer in a basement laboratory at the Vancouver Aquarium, Peter scrawls into his notebook pieces of her story, and of their story together. Slowly, he begins to see the secret tunnels between Helen's death and the death of her parents, between her loyalty to her sister, France, and her passion for right action. A sensual, haunting book-length poem, Anchoress moves gracefully from the painted caves of Vichy France, where Helen's mother is born, to the banks of the Seine where her parents meet; from a foster home in Illinois to the grey stone university buildings where Helen becomes obsessed with the televised events of the Gulf War. This book will challenge the way we think about the boundaries between politics and passions, love and war.

A Poem

Anchoress

Michael Ondaatje

Michael Redhill

An Anchor Books Original Seventy-four distinguished writers tell personal tales of books loved and lost–great books overlooked, under-read, out of print, stolen, scorned, extinct, or otherwise out of commission. Compiled by the editors of Brick: A Literary Magazine, Lost Classics is a reader’s delight: an intriguing and entertaining collection of eulogies for lost books. As the editors have written in a joint introduction to the book, “being lovers of books, we’ve pulled a scent of these absences behind us our whole reading lives, telling people about books that exist only on our own shelves, or even just in our own memory.” Anyone who has ever been changed by a book will find kindred spirits in the pages of Lost Classics. Each of the editors has contributed a lost book essay to this collection, including Michael Ondaatje on Sri Lankan filmmaker Tissa Abeysekara’s Bringing Tony Home, a novella about a mutual era of childhood. Also included are Margaret Atwood on sex and death in the scandalous Doctor Glas, first published in Sweden in 1905; Russell Banks on the off-beat travelogue Too Late to Turn Back by Barbara Greene–the “slightly ditzy” cousin of Graham; Bill Richardson on a children’s book for adults by Russell Hoban; Ronald Wright on William Golding’s Pincher Martin; Caryl Phillips on Michael Mac Liammoir’s account of his experiences on the set of Orson Welles’s Othello, and much, much more.

Esta Spalding

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