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list price: $9.99
edition:eBook
also available: Paperback
category: Fiction
published: Nov 2012
ISBN:9781926708362
publisher: Inanna Publications

Ile D'Or

by Mary Lou Dickinson

tagged: literary, contemporary women
Description

Shortly after the first referendum on Quebec separation, four people in their forties encounter each other in Ile d’Or, the town where all of them grew up. The novel is about gold and greed and renewal and hope. About people who emerge from a frontier existence into the society of the late twentieth century with the need to discover how their contemporary lives connect with their pasts: how growing up in a mining town in northern Quebec in the 1930s through 1950s shaped who they are today. They do this with the hope that confronting the past may better equip them for moving on with their stalled lives. Their need to be reconciled with themselves can only be satisfied through a reconciliation with the community in which they grew up. A vibrant novel that deals with language, community and the politics of Canada as it explores the hardscrabble life of a mining town—a company town—and the psychological fallout for the adults and children who live there.

About the Author
Mary Lou Dickinson graduated with a Master in Library Science from the University of Toronto and worked for many years as a crisis counsellor. Her fiction has been published in the University of Windsor Review, Descant, Waves, Grain, Northern Journey, Impulse, Writ and broadcast on CBC Radio. Her writing was also included in the anthology, We Who Can Fly: Poems, Essays and Memories in Honour of Adele Wiseman. Mary Lou Dickinson lives in Toronto.
Awards
  • Winner, IPPY Bronze Medal Winner for Regional Fiction
Editorial Review

If you open Ile d'Or expecting to find the likes of Rita MacNeil and her quaint crew of crooning miners, you will be disappointed. Ile d'Or reads nothing like Cape Breton's Men of the Deeps and its folksy repertoire of mining tales. With a storytelling style that skillfully combines the fragility of the human condition with the rock-hard reality of life in a northern mining town, Dickinson threads together the lives not only of miners and their bosses, but also the larger social fabric of a Quebec mining town on the heels of the province's failed 1980 independence referendum. Dickinson's writing style is slow and deliberate. Like the best writers this country produces, nobody rushes Munro, Ondaatje or Gowdy and nobody is going to rush Mary Lou Dickinson. Fortunately, she doesn't write like any of them (okay, maybe a little like Munro), but something like Bonnie Burnard. Both dig deep into the subject of partnerships, relationships, memory (not nostalgia) and ordinary lives.

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