Oakville Beaver, Melanie Cummings, February 27, 2009
columnist turned author, a singer and songwriter come memoirist and an outreach worker newly emerged as storyteller — these are the career paths of the scribes who took centre stage at the recent Bookers Author’s Brunch. After 15 years as Toronto Star humour columnist, Linwood Barclay packed in his newspaper career last year to pursue book writing.
“I always wanted to write mysteries and thrillers,” Barclay told about 150 book lovers gathered at the Oakville Golf Club. But before even retiring from the Star, Barclay had made his mark. When No Time for Goodbye was published in 2007, his first thriller had became a best-seller in Germany, only to be outdone “annoyingly” that year by J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame. And thanks to the U. K.’s version of Oprah’s book picks, BBC TV hosts Richard and Judy put No Time for Goodbye on their 2008 Summer Reads list, catapulting it to the single best-selling novel there last year. Daunted but not dismayed to follow up on that success, Barclay has created his latest mystery Too Close to Home. It’s a story that was spawned by the thought that if everyone in the house next door is killed, probability would dictate it won’t happen in that neighbourhood again. But what if the killers went to the wrong house?
The Sudden Disappearance of Seetha is garnering plenty of positive attention in this debut novel from Toronto’s Andrea Gunraj. “I had no aspirations to be an author,” said the outreach worker for Metropolitan Action Committee on Violence Against Women and Children. With a grant from the Toronto Arts Council, Gunraj took time off her job to complete her book that tells the story of Neela, a rebel who is envious of her brother Navi’s genius. She takes up with the town bad boy, running away with him to the eco-tourist town of Eden. When she gets pregnant and discovers there is no future with the baby’s father, Neela heads back home. But when her infant daughter is kidnapped, she relies on her brother for help. It examines feelings of jealousy and regret, and life lessons learned while maturing. “I have a naïve goal to make the world better,” said Gunraj. “Regrets are important but what we do to act on them and make change is far more important.” Borrowing a quote from Alice Walker that asks: “If art doesn’t make us better, than what is it for?” Gunraj wants to make a difference through her writing, but she’s not going to quit her day job to do that.
The name Dan Hill is most often connected with such well-known songs as Sometimes When We Touch, a song he released in 1977 and could have retired at the age of 23 for all of its success. In fact, when he called his dad, former Ontario Human Rights Commissioner Daniel Grafton Hill, to tell him, the good news was greeted only with cynicism and disbelief. I Am My Father’s Son is a memoir chronicling Hill’s acrimonious relationship with his “larger than life” dad, as a child of a mixed race couple and living with an activist, idealistic mom whose manic depression resulted in “sudden disappearances” to a psychiatric hospital. When his dad died in 2003, Hill said he died with him. Unable to write lyrics, he turned to prose. After reading archived letters that his dad had written at age 17 to his own father, Hill realized his battle for parental approval was a generational struggle. Incidentally, he discovered the difficulty of venturing into his brother’s literary territory — Hill’s brother is Lawrence, the author of the number 1 bestseller The Book of Negroes. “Fiction is a lot harder than memoir writing,” said Hill, who got his mom’s permission to write I Am My Father’s Son. Ironically, a song called My Father’s Son that he wrote and performed for his dad before he slipped into a coma, recently came out as a single.