The Mountain Story

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THE MOUNTAIN STORY a novel by Lori Lansens 94,000 words/ Edited manuscript now available A HIGHLY DRAMATIC ADVENTURE STORY AND A REVEALING EXAMINATION OF FAMILY DYNAMICS

The Mountain Story is a whopping great adventure tale, but it is much more than that. It is an epic family drama in the mould of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, which served as Lori’s inspiration.

The novel is set on a mountain outside Palm Springs. Travelling up on the cable car from city to mountainside is akin to moving from the climate of Mexico to the climate of Alaska in about ﬁfteen minutes. The mountain is easy to get lost on — Lori has done it. You can always see the desert city below, but you cannot ﬁnd your way down to it.

The Mountain Story is told by Wolf Truly, who on his eighteenth birthday got lost with three women for ﬁve days in the mountain wilderness just outside Palm Springs. Now an adult and a father, Wolf is writing this account of what really happened on the mountain for his son Danny, who has just started college. Wolf realizes that he owes his son the truth, for reasons that become clear in a shocking revelation at the end of the novel.

Tense and gripping, The Mountain Story includes sex, death, deep Photo: Laura Starks emotion, and sacriﬁce. Praise for the work of Lori Lansens “The Girls, by Lori Lansens, is a ballad, a melancholy song of two very strange, enchanted girls who live out their peculiar, ordinary lives is a rural corner of Canada….The Girls glides by like a watercolor dream, ﬁnding its poetry in dailiness and the universalities of human desire and connection…. Lansens, who has a gentle, open way of writing, makes of these two girls a kind of perfect marriage, harmonious and everlasting.” — THE NEW YORK TIMES

“Like short-story queen Alice Munro, to whom she is often compared, Lansens demonstrates a singular gift for discerning both the ordinary and the extraordinary in small-town life and small-town people.” — THE WINNIPEG FREE PRESS

“Rush Home Road, the story of a 70-year-old woman’s journey through the nearly unbearable sorrows of her past, in order to save an abandoned little girl, is a ﬁrst novel of exquisite power, honesty, and conviction. Its portrait of how much has changed, and how little, over nearly a century, in the realms of race, love, hate, and loss, is quite nearly without ﬂaws.” — JACQUELYN MITCHARD, author of The Deep End of the Ocean

“Lansens’s great capacity for humour and insight… makes The Wife’s Tale riveting and compelling.” — ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

LORI LANSENS was a successful screenwriter before she burst onto the RIGHTS SOLD literary scene in 2002 with her ﬁrst novel Rush Home Road. Published in US: Gallery/Simon & Schuster, eleven countries, Rush Home Road received rave reviews around the world. April 2015 UK: Simon and Schuster, April 2015 Her follow-up novel The Girls was an international success as well. Rights were Canada: Knopf, spring 2015 sold in 13 territories and it featured as a book club pick by Richard & Judy in the Norway: Juritzen Forlag UK, selling 300,000 copies. Her third novel The Wife’s Tale is in development Israel: Keter as a ﬁlm. Born and raised in Chatham, Ontario, Lori Lansens now makes her home in Los Angeles with her husband and two children. THE MOUNTAIN STORY AN EXCERPT

Dear Daniel, A person has to have lived a little to appreciate a survival story. Isn’t that what I’ve always said? I promised that when I thought you were old enough to hear it, I’d tell you mine. It’s no tale for a child, but you’re hardly a child anymore. Still, it’s hard to know when a son’s ready for the truth about his old man. You’re older now than I was when I got lost with three strangers in the mountain wilderness. Five days in the freezing cold without adequate food or water or shelter. You know that part, and you know that not everyone survived. What happened up there changed my life. The story will change yours. The night of your middle school graduation was the first time I almost told you what really happened; then it was your fourteenth birthday, and fifteenth, and every birthday after. You begged to hear it, and you deserved to be told, but it was never that simple, Danny. To understand about the mountain, you have to know what came before. Remember last spring when we were visiting colleges? We were on that dark gravel road just outside of Bloomington and I nearly hit the deer. I was so shaken I had to pull off at a truck stop. You tried to comfort me, pointing out that the deer wasn’t injured, and even if there had been a collision it wouldn’t have been my fault. I was going to tell you then. I had the perfect opening. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was the one who wasn’t ready to face the truth, and I realized I was never going to be ready to tell you how I managed to survive — not face to face. I’d edit, censor, lie, anything to avoid seeing your pain. But there’s no point in telling half a story, is there? Or worse, one that’s mostly fiction. So I wrote it down. I typed the whole thing out as it came to my fingers because that felt like the most honest thing to do. As for the timing? With you starting at Indiana State? When you get older you’ll see that there isn’t so much a good time or bad time for things, appearances to the contrary. There is just a time. The day I got lost with those three women — that fateful November day — was my first trip up the mountain in exactly one year. I’ll confess to you, that on that cool, grey afternoon of my eighteenth birthday, I was going to hike to a spot called Angel’s Peak to jump to my death. No one else knows that part of the story. When you were a little boy you’d study me in quiet moments and ask if I was thinking about the mountain. I almost always was. You asked if I ever dreamed about it. I did. Still do — especially now. Sometimes I wake up in a panic. Sometimes I wake missing old friends. My fellow hikers have been with me, in one way or another, since we were lost together all those years ago, walking alongside me when I’m out with the dogs, quiet when I’m reading in bed, guiding me with whispers when I can’t find my way. This is their story too. I’ve felt them looking over my shoulder, insisting on full disclosure. I’ve been grateful for the haunting. Your mother? She’s always said she didn’t need to know all the gory details. She’s been just fine in the dark. Still, we both knew this day would come, and once you’re finished reading, she’ll have to read it too. I’m afraid I’ve caged the truth for so long it’ll die in the wild. Your mother wishes it already had. Here it is, with love from a father to his son — the mountain story. Dad

THE BUKOWSKI AGENCY LTD. 14 Prince Arthur Avenue, Suite 202 Toronto, Ontario M5R 1A9 Tel: (416) 928-6728 Fax: (416) 963-9978 e-mail: [email protected] www.bukowskiagency.com THE BEAR a novel by Claire Cameron 65,000 words / Finished books now available s Longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction s #1 bestseller in Canada IN A NAIL-BITER OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SUSPENSE TOLD BY A FIVE-YEAR-OLD IN A VOICE REMINISCENT OF ROOM, TWO SMALL CHILDREN ARE LEFT ALONE AT A REMOTE ISLAND CAMPGROUND WHEN THEIR PARENTS ARE ATTACKED BY A BEAR Algonquin Park consists of nearly three thousand square miles of wilderness situated 250 miles northeast of Toronto. It is a popular destination for campers, hikers, and canoeists. When in 1991 a couple who went on a camping trip there failed to return, friends contacted the police. Their partially eaten remains were found, with a large male black bear standing guard over them. There is no clear reason for what happened. Attacks by healthy black bears are extremely rare.

Claire Cameron has imagined what might have transpired if the couple had brought small children with them. The Bear grabs you by the throat and will not let you go. Written by an author who has much experience of both wilderness survival and motherhood, it is a brilliant examination of how children help each other and themselves in such Photo: Roberto Caruso circumstances — a sort of rebuttal to Lord of the Flies.

Praise for Claire Cameron’s The Bear “A gripping survival thriller… [an] agonizing odyssey of loss and being lost also has humour. The book’s anguished yet hopeful ending provides a touching terminus for Anna and Stick’s journey to adulthood. This expertly crafted novel could do for camping what Jaws did for swimming.” — PEOPLE, four-star review “It was even more haunting the second time around.” — THE INDEPENDENT, UK “Stylistically impressive and deeply moving.” — GLAMOUR MAGAZINE, UK

“The Bear is a taut and touching story of how a child’s love and denial become survival skills. Claire Cameron takes a fairytale situation of children pitted against the wilderness, removes the fairies, and adds a terrifying and ravenous bear. I devoured this wonderful new novel in one day — if I can use the word ‘devoured’ for a book about a bear.” — CHARLOTTE ROGAN, author of The Lifeboat

“An emotional tour de force. Claire Cameron’s The Bear offers us an unforgettable child-narrator who propels us through a story as unsettling as it is bone-chilling, and as suspenseful as it is moving.” — MEGAN ABBOTT, author of Dare Me and The End of Everything

CLAIRE CAMERON was born in 1973 and grew up in Toronto. She studied RIGHTS SOLD History and Culture at Queen’s University. She then worked as an instructor for US: Little, Brown, Feb 2014 Outward Bound, teaching mountaineering, climbing, and white-water rafting in Canada: Doubleday Oregon. Next she worked in San Francisco for Pearson Plc before moving to UK: Harvill Secker London in 1999. There she was director of Shift Media, a consultancy whose clients Netherlands: Cargo/De Bezige Bij Brazil: Bertrand included the BBC, McGraw-Hill, and Oxford University Press. Her ﬁrst novel was the taut thriller The Line Painter. Claire lives in Toronto with her husband and two sons. THE BEAR AN EXCERPT

I CAN HEAR THE AIR going in and out of my brother’s nose. I am awake. He is two years old and almost three and he bugs me lots of times because I am already six years old but it is warm sleeping next to him. I call him Stick. He always falls asleep before me and I listen to the air of his nose. I can hear my parents’ voices. They are farther away than I can reach and whispering because they think I can’t hear. I let out a squeak to let Momma know I am awake and she says, “We’re right here” from too far away. I squeak again and the zipper undoes and I can see the sky in the crack. Her cool hand brushes my hair back and her fingers touch my cheek. “Sssh, Ana” she says and the sky zips away again. When I am inside a tent the outside is far away. The tent is green and sniffs like dust. My parents have a fire that they are not sharing with me and they are cooking something too. Bacon. I love bacon. My tummy rumbles and I want bacon but it will make Daddy mad. I sniff Gwen teddy bear instead. She is brown and smells of us. And hear the air whistle when it leaves Sticky’s nose. I feel nervous and I don’t know why. The night will be dark soon. And it might be the meat is making my tummy weird. When we were at the cottage, Sticky was chewing on bacon and he shoved another in his mouth and another and another. When Momma saw she said “chew your food” but Stick couldn’t chew because his mouth was all full. He started to go red and his eyes got watery and I thought he was crying. I said, “Ha ha, Alex’s crying” and Momma came and thumped him. A ball of bacon came out of his mouth. Momma got Sticky in trouble for not chewing and I looked at the meat. It had spit on it. I felt a barf in my mouth. And I didn’t eat that bacon ball but it followed us here. It’s making my tummy feel weird. The air is cold. I roll closer to Stick. His breath goes in my ear and it is warm. A little piece of light from the fire is having a dance on the side of the tent but only a little because it is not very dark yet. There is no music except Stick’s nose air and still the light flicks and rolls on the side of the tent. I can’t sleep. I tuck Gwen under the covers so she isn’t cold and I creep over to the door. The zipper has teeth that grab on my skin. I go slow so it doesn’t bite and I open it just a little bit so my face can be out. The carpet here is made of pine needles. They smell like the yellow bottle I use to help Momma clean the bathtub. There are prickle trees all around our camp. These are the ones that forgot the needles on the ground. The moon is going to switch with the sun and the moon will have a tail that shows up on the water. The water is not chop, chop, chop any more. It sits quietly in the lake now because it is sleeping. Close to the water, really far away from me, I can see two shadows. I can hear from the whispers that it’s Momma and Daddy and they are laughing. Momma leans forward and I see a ponytail like a horse’s hanging down. Her face is smiling and I can see her teeth in a nice way. The only other person I can see is Coleman.

HAWLEY DOES FOR ICONIC AMERICAN PIONEER DANIEL BOONE WHAT HILARY MANTEL DID FOR CROMWELL AND PETER CAREY DID FOR NED KELLY

Told in his inimitable, haunting voice, All True Not a Lie in It hinges on Daniel Boone’s captivity by the Shawnee during the Revolutionary War, after the kidnapping and rescue of one child and the murder of another.

Frontiersman and trailblazer Daniel Boone is known to every American schoolchild mostly for fighting bears and Indians. The myths that surround him are legion. But few are aware that his Quaker family was banished from their settlement, beginning the peripatetic life that he continued until his last days, searching for a paradise that he could call his own, and for safety both from the Indians upon whose territory he was constantly impinging and from the conflicts of competing colonial stakeholders. Known today as a fierce Indian-fighter, he in fact was as small man who abhorred violence, respected Native people, and was adopted by them.

Alix Hawley ﬂeshes out this one-dimensional folk hero so that Photo: Courtesy of the author we penetrate deep within his psyche: the charismatic politician, businessman, and soldier who was also a slave-owner; the husband who struggled to mollify his wife, whom he frequently abandoned with their children while he wandered eighteenth-century America, or dragged with him while cutting a trail through the wilderness that hundreds of thousands would eventually follow; and the loving father whose actions led directly to the torture and murder of his son.

All True Not a Lie in It climaxes with Boone’s capture by the Shawnee in 1778, when he came to be treated like a beloved son by the chief whose son he had killed while rescuing his own daughter. The unique voice Alix Hawley has found for Boone provides an incredibly intriguing inner journey for a figure who these days seems only a tall tale. It’s a brilliant first novel, replete with storytelling that is taut and expert, descriptions that are rich and intense, and prose that is full of feeling, especially about Daniel’s love and longing. Its finely honed language is reminiscent of earlier novels like The Last of the Mohicans, but also feels completely contemporary. Alix Hawley has masterfully imagined the experience of settling America through the eyes and the heart of one of its most famous settlers.

ALIX HAWLEY [D.Phil., M. St. (Oxford), M.A. (East Anglia), B.A. Hons. (UBC)] RIGHTS SOLD studied English Literature and Creative Writing at Oxford University, the University Canada: Knopf, Jan 2015 of East Anglia, and the University of British Columbia. She published a story collection, The Old Familiar, with Thistledown Press in 2008. One of her stories was a runner-up in the 2012 CBC Canada Writes competition. She resides in Kelowna, British Columbia, with her husband and two children. ALL TRUE NOT A LIE IN IT AN EXCERPT

HOW YOU SCALP SOMEONE is like this. Cut a small round down to the bone beneath the hair on top of the head near the front. Put your foot on the back of the person to be scalped, pull the hair at the edge of the hole. The whole skin comes free easy enough, easier than skinning a deer. Jamesie my son you once asked me how and I refused to say at that time but I do not see why I should keep it from you any longer, now you are dead. If you are listening. But perhaps you cannot hear me, perhaps you do not wish to. In the bad times in the Yadkin Valley we found two children with scabbed patches of bone on the tops of their heads, left to sicken or starve after their parents and houses were burned and their hair was taken. Some can survive it. I saw a man done at the Monongahela River. He did not I believe, but I do not know. Some other children were taken captive. I do not forget that. So many people shifting about, bought and sold and traded, this country is full of their tracks. I have wondered too about the sound of the skin surrendering itself up and how the head left behind must feel. I have seen the hair dangling from the dried skins stretched on hoops in Indian villages. And black Indian hair turned in by English scalpers for Governor’s money. No scalps here where I now am. None that I have seen. It is a quiet place at this time. The snow makes things quiet and still. I could do it if I had to as I know. For a time I would have done it hour after hour and day after day had I only had the opportunity. The slave Adam told of the terrible things he heard despite having stuffed his fingers down his ears. I did the same at night for months. James asking for help. For Daddy. For death. Now I can hear it, I can hear it, his poor voice thickened and without words at the last. The echo of it spreading out across the night country, shivering like wind over water or over the grasses of Kentucky. For ever. The father, which is to say I, only two miles away, did not hear. My brother Squire told me the bodies were left in garbled ruins but not scalped. They do not take white scalps in peacetime. I force my breath into a rough laugh. I chop at a tree. Pale chips fly back at me, let them blind and choke me. Someone speaks to me in a friendly way but I am tired to the bone and I do not understand or wish to. I am not alive. For a time I used to try to picture the murderer’s face but it has fallen away like a mask leaving behind black nothing. I used to ask him in my mind what point there is in killing boys for sport, without a fair fight. What point there is in killing a boy you know to speak to, but a boy you know nothing of otherwise. Aside from the fact that he did not like to smoke. And that he was my boy. I now let bears get too near before I shoot. I let deer get too far away. If I were really to see the face, what is there that I might do? I have thought of every burning and ripping and carving up that there can be. There is nothing else. I can think of nothing. I can think of him no more. And Jamesie is hidden also, I cannot see him. I did not see him dead, I did not go back for him with the burying party.

THE BUKOWSKI AGENCY LTD. 14 Prince Arthur Avenue, Suite 202 Toronto, Ontario M5R 1A9 Tel: (416) 928-6728 Fax: (416) 963-9978 e-mail: [email protected] www.bukowskiagency.com PLACES OF THE HEART THE PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY OF EVERYDAY LIFE by Colin Ellard 80,000–90,000 words / Manuscript available Jan 2015 Proposal and sample now available PLACES OF THE HEART EXPLORES THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EMOTION AND PLACE BY REVEALING THE WAYS IN WHICH DIFFERENT KINDS OF PLACES ELICIT SPECIFIC FEELINGS

s How does the organization of a workplace influence our feelings of well-being and productivity? s Why is it that some of us can’t wait to get home after work, while others dread the thought of home, no matter how much we enjoy the other people in it? s Why does our craving for certain neighborhoods send their property values sky high while other neighborhoods become desolate wastelands? Psychogeography shows us how strongly our surroundings influence our feelings and our emotions. Each chapter of Places of the Heart shows us how one type of space affects us emotionally, and how modern technology is altering this interaction. Photo: Diana Fleming Praise for Colin Ellard’s You Are Here “Delightfully lucid… Elllard has a knack for distilling obscure scientific theories into practical wisdom.” — THE NEW YORK TIMES “[A] smart, deeply satisfying exploration of how creatures from insects to humans handle the complexities of physical space… his message is well-reasoned and important.” — THE CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER “You Are Here provides a colorful, well-charted atlas of our subjective mental maps — visual stories that we tell ourselves — and an impassioned argument for finding our true place in the world we inhabit.” — TOM VANDERBILT, author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do “One of the finest science writers I’ve ever read … It’s fun, pure fun.” — THE LOS ANGELES TIMES “Ellard writes with admirable clarity… An anecdotally rich provocation in service of environmental awareness.” — KIRKUS REVIEWS “[A] fascinating and exhaustive rundown of the processes involved in keeping us and other animals moving in the right direction… an absorbing read.” — GLOBE AND MAIL

COLIN ELLARD is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of RIGHTS SOLD Waterloo, Ontario, Director of its Research Laboratory for Immersive Virtual North America: Bellevue Literary Environments, and Director of the “Testing! Testing” urban project at the BMW Press, fall 2015 Korea: Gilbut Publishing Company Guggenheim Lab, New York. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Scientific Russia: Alpina American, Psychology Today, and in international scientific journals for more than twenty years. His first book, You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon But Get Lost in the Mall, inspired a reviewer in the Los Angeles Times to call him “one of the finest science writers I have ever read.” PLACES OF THE HEART

Places of the Heart Table of Contents Chapter 1 Place matters: The settings of your life affect your thoughts, feelings and actions Chapter 2 Places of affection: Why do we love a place? Chapter 3 Big Love: Feelings of attachment to urban spaces Chapter 4 Places of amusement: The mystery of creating pleasure Chapter 5 Places of fascination: The science of the restorative experience Chapter 6 Places of incarceration: The psychology of surveillance and privacy Chapter 7 Places of awe: Constructing signiﬁcance Chapter 8 Places of imagination: Mediated Experience Chapter 9 Places of boredom: Cookie-cutter design and the loss of authenticity Chapter 10 Places of anxiety: Managing our feelings in stressful places Chapter 11 Places of sadness: Why would a designer want to make us sad on purpose? Chapter 12 Finding a place to call your own Hands-On Appendix Your Places — Measuring Your Psychogeography

THE BUKOWSKI AGENCY LTD. 14 Prince Arthur Avenue, Suite 202 Toronto, Ontario M5R 1A9 Tel: (416) 928-6728 Fax: (416) 963-9978 e-mail: [email protected] www.bukowskiagency.com AS CHIMNEY SWEEPERS COME TO DUST a novel by Alan Bradley 87,000 words / Edited manuscript available September 2014 THE 7th MYSTERY IN THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING FLAVIA DE LUCE SERIES

FROM THE WINNER OF THE CRIME WRITERS’ ASSOCIATION DEBUT DAGGER AWARD, BARRY AWARD, AGATHA AWARD, MACAVITY AWARD, DILYS AWARD, AND ARTHUR ELLIS AWARD

SOON TO BE A TV SERIES FROM ACCLAIMED DIRECTOR SAM MENDES

OVER 2 MILLION COPIES OF THE FLAVIA DE LUCE SERIES SOLD WORLDWIDE Photo: Jeff Bassett Hard on the heels of the return of her mother’s body from the frozen reaches of the Himalayas, Flavia, for her indiscretions, is banished from her home at Buckshaw and shipped across the ocean to Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy in Toronto, her mother’s alma mater, there to be inducted into the a mysterious organization known as the Nide. No sooner does she arrive, however, than a body comes crashing down out of the chimney and into her room, setting off a series of investigations into mysterious disappearances of girls from the school.

Praise for volume six, The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches “Bradley has managed to create one of the most beguiling detectives of recent years.” — THE GUARDIAN “She now seems certain to become a national treasure. Film director Sam Mendes’ production company – which made Call The Midwife for the BBC – has optioned her stories for TV. Flavia deserves it. She is as addictive as dark chocolate and as English as Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending.” — DAILY MAIL “Alan Bradley has an uncanny ability to take us into the mind and emotions of our young detective as she deals with both her grief and the mystery, and somehow makes it all believable and entertaining.” — MYSTERY SCENE MAGAZINE “This latest adventure contains all the winning elements of the previous books while skillfully establishing a new and intriguing story line to explore in future novels … Fans will be more than pleased.” — LIBRARY JOURNAL “Flavia retains her droll wit … the solution to the murder is typically neat, and the conclusion sets up future books nicely.” — PUBLISHERS WEEKLY “It’s hard to resist either the genre’s pre-eminent preteen sleuth or the hushed revelations about her family.” — KIRKUS REVIEWS

ALAN BRADLEY is the internationally bestselling author of short stories, children’s RIGHTS SOLD stories, newspaper columns, and the memoir The Shoebox Bible. The Flavia de Luce US: Delacorte, March 2015 mystery series has been sold in 37 territories and has sold more than 2 million copies N. American English Audio: Random House worldwide. Director Sam Mendes has picked up television rights to the series. The Canada: Doubleday, March 2015 books have been bestsellers in Canada, the USA, Germany, Russia, Brazil, China, UK: Orion and Holland, appearing on bestseller lists in The New York Times — where the ﬁrst Germany: Blanvalet two books appeared simultaneously — and Der Spiegel — for four months. Poland: Vesper AS CHIMNEY SWEEPERS COME TO DUST AN EXCERPT

IF YOU’RE ANYTHING LIKE ME, YOU ADORE ROT. It is pleasant to reflect on the fact that decay and decomposition are what make the world go round. For instance, when an ancient oak falls somewhere in the forest, it begins almost at once to be consumed by invisible predators. These highly-specialized hordes of bacteria lay siege to their target as methodically as an army of barbarians attacking an enemy fortress. The mission of the first wave is to break down the protein forms of the stricken timber into ammonia, which can then be easily handled by the second team, which converts the smelly ammonia to nitrites. These last, and final invaders, by oxidation, convert the nitrites into the nitrates which are required to fertilize the soil, and thus to grow new seedling oaks. Through the miracle of chemistry, a colossus has been reduced to its essentials by microscopic life forms. Forests are born and die, come and go, like a spinning penny flipped into the air: heads…tails…life…death…life…death…and so on from Creation to the farthest ends of time. It’s bloody marvelous, if you ask me. Left to the mercies of the soil, dead human bodies undergo the same basic 1—2—3 process: meat—ammonia—nitrates. But when a corpse is swaddled tightly in a soiled flag, stuffed up a brick chimney, and left there for a donkey’s age to char and mummify in the heat and the smoke—well, that’s an entirely different story.

Other Books in the Flavia De Luce Series

THE BUKOWSKI AGENCY LTD. 14 Prince Arthur Avenue, Suite 202 Toronto, Ontario M5R 1A9 Tel: (416) 928-6728 Fax: (416) 963-9978 e-mail: [email protected] www.bukowskiagency.com MYSTERIOUS FRAGRANCE OF THE YELLOW MOUNTAINS a novel by Yasuko Thanh 70,500 words / Edited manuscript available fall 2014 s Author of “Floating Like the Dead”, winner of the 2009 Journey Prize for the best short story published in Canada AN HISTORICAL NOVEL SET IN FRENCH INDOCHINA A doctor brews a potion from the dartura flower with the aim of poisoning soldiers in the French garrison in Saigon. Based on the real-life Hanoi Poisoning Plot of 1908, this novel tells a story that crosses the landscape of Vietnam when the doctor is forced to flee. The characters include a fish-girl pulled from the Mekong River — in a superstition-rich land, this is an omen; a poet with one green eye; a rich revolutionary who detests his inheritance money, and a pregnant wife who keeps a menagerie of pigeons, cats, and a boa constrictor.

The stories in this novel are Yasuko Thanh’s family’s stories. For political reasons, her grandfather was forced into hiding for two years during the Japanese occupation of Vietnam, after which time her grandmother and father set out to search for him. Falling somewhere between Kiran Desai’s Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, and The End of the Alphabet by C.S. Richardson, the novel promises a poetic, fantastic, darkly comic look at the cost of insurrection as well as the complications of falling in Photo: Anastasia Andrews love at a time when historical conditions complicate it. Praise for Yasuko Thanh “Her empathy for a variety of characters in crisis – from a German nanny choosing a husband to a betrayed Vietnamese wife – is impressive, as is her talent for reimagining little-known historical periods. Together, these qualities combine to make Floating like the Dead an impressive debut.” — THE MONTREAL GAZETTE “A prize-winner well before the publication of her ﬁrst book, Yasuko Thanh impresses above all with the thematic complexity of her approach. Coupling a globetrotter’s perspective and historical curiosity to that, her stories conjure vignettes of troubling existence, where change is possible but outcomes deviate far from plans.” — NATIONAL POST “Yasuko Thanh writes with a tiger’s eye for detail, her sentences haunt, images ﬂash like lightning. She is a major talent.” — WAYSON CHOY

YASUKO THANH’s story collection Floating Like the Dead was published by RIGHTS SOLD McClelland & Stewart in 2012 and was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award and Canada: Hamish Hamilton/Penguin the BC Book Prize for Fiction. One story in it won an Arthur Ellis Award for Best Romania: Editura RAO Crime Short Story. The title story was the Journey Prize winner for the best story published in Canada in 2009. Quill and Quire named Floating Like the Dead a best book of the year. CBC hailed Yasuko Thanh one of 10 writers to watch in 2013. MYSTERIOUS FRAGRANCE OF THE YELLOW MOUNTAINS AN EXCERPT

IF YOU FAIL TO BURY A BODY, if the body dies away from home and is not honoured with the proper rituals of mourning, if the body dies unloved while hurrying on its way to an exam, or without its head, in the middle of a field, lonely, if it dies in the street, lost, if it dies a violent death, if it dies with a bamboo pole on its neck, the shoulder calloused from heavy work, if it dies alone, it will become a wandering ghost. In 1908 the French rule Cochinchina. The pro-independence movement is scattered and unorganized. In the south, an army trains not to fight, but to become invisible; the general is working on a potion that will make them vanish in front of the eyes of the French. In a hundred years, one will be able to board a plane to Ho Chi Minh City and pay a woman with small feet and waist-length hair a few dong for a body massage, to be rendered and received naked in a room that smells of coconut oil. Today there are only a small number of English and German merchants living in the colony. They sometimes dine with French Navy officers, and discuss the politics of Italian missionaries proselytizing in the area. The French chop off the heads of Vietnamese nationalists or expel them to South American jungle camps. They display the heads in the market place; flies skulk on the eyes, nostrils, mouths, seeking moisture. Ghosts roost in banyan trees because if they descend, angry shopkeepers shoo them away with brooms. In the North, swooping over the country as if we are a bird, one spies a bay full of pirates near the Gulf of Tonkin and fishermen’s houses clinging to the shore. Knee-deep in water, women work in the fenced-off plot of a rice paddy. On the other side of the hill, a Tonkinese coal mine and a small cattle farm shelter a group of houses where pottery-makers and brick-makers live. Now our bird floats to the Central Highlands where Cham tribe members wander, wearing head caps decorated with polished pebbles. A woman swings a coloured shawl around her shoulders and watches a man bag a rhinoceros with a stick made of sharpened bamboo. He amazes the woman, who bellows a song in his honour. When their child, who has tired himself scurrying through the underbrush all day, has finally gone to sleep on a woven floor, moveable so it can be elevated when the river water rises, they smoke marijuana from their pipe and the scent rises into the Giant Kapok trees like a perfume. Then they make love. Now our bird sees the Moys, another prehistoric tribe that live in bamboo houses with thatched roofs and stilts near the river. Descended from Hindu kings, they wind in procession through the fire trees, sucking regally on their marijuana pipes. The men wear loin cloths, arrows in bags slung on their backs, and the women stroll around with squares of fabric that barely cover their breasts, and both men and women pierce their ears. Their toes are spread wide from years of walking barefoot.

THE BUKOWSKI AGENCY LTD. 14 Prince Arthur Avenue, Suite 202 Toronto, Ontario M5R 1A9 Tel: (416) 928-6728 Fax: (416) 963-9978 e-mail: [email protected] www.bukowskiagency.com THE HOUSE OF WIVES a novel by Simon Choa-Johnston 92,000 words / Unedited manuscript now available BASED ON A TRUE STORY The House of Wives is inspired by the true story of Simon Choa- Johnston’s ancestors. It tells the story of Emanuel, a Jew from Calcutta who in 1862 sailed to Hong Kong to take up the opium trade. There he took a second wife (he had left the ﬁrst one behind in India), grew prosperous, built himself a grand mansion called Kingsclere, and began to have children. Life became more complicated however when his Indian wife decided, unannounced, to join him in Hong Kong, and Kingsclere became The House of Wives. Mysteriously, thirty-six years after his arrival, Emmanuel ﬂed Hong Kong alone for London, where he died a pauper in 1905.

Given those basic facts, playwright and director Simon Choa- Johnston has created a fascinating and compelling drama exploring a little-known corner of history. It is a novel that he has been preparing to write all his life, not only through archival research and family interviews but through travel to India and Hong Kong. It includes a family curse, and tragic death, and an abundance of mystery. Photo: David Cooper

Simon Choa-Johnston’s ancestral home, Kingsclere, circa 1880, on Simon Choa-Johnston’s great-grandmother, Pearl, is at the centre of this photo what is now known as Kennedy Terrace, Hong Kong. Today only the in black, with a little black cap. His grandmother, Felicie Choa, Emanuel’s and foundations remain. Pearl’s daughter, is second to her left in white. His mother, Pauline, Emanuel and Pearl’s granddaughter, is at Pearl’s knee in white.

Born and raised in Hong Kong, SIMON CHOA-JOHNSTON came to Canada to RIGHTS SOLD attend McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and graduated in 1972, after Canada: Penguin which he went to New York for postgraduate theatre studies. He has worked in Canadian theatre for over twenty-ﬁve years as an Artistic Director, Director (over 200 productions), and Playwright. He was awarded the Governor General’s Canada 125 Medal, has been nominated for the prestigious W.O. Mitchell Literary Prize, and was inducted into McMaster University’s Alumni Gallery. Simon spent twelve years as the Artistic & Executive Director of the Gateway Theatre in Richmond, B.C., from 2000 – 2012. THE HOUSE OF WIVES AN EXCERPT

A FIVE-YEAR-OLD’S ENCOUNTER WITH THE DEVIL is different from a grown-up’s. If the confrontation is serious enough, the child will lock it in her mind’s eye forever. The grown-up will bolt, run as fast as he can, scale mountains if needed, to put as much distance as he can between himself and the fiend. Such was the case for the child riding on her father’s back. He was a thin, wiry Hakka. She wondered if the three-inch gash on the side of his head still hurt. It had scabbed over but was still puffy. Her arms wound tightly around his neck. Her legs wrapped around his waist. And her face was buried between his shoulder blades. The child had walked as far as her little legs would carry her. She knew she was a good girl — her father had told her so. She hadn’t cried even though she was hungry. Fearing detection, they had slept during the day away from the hill paths. At night they had walked south towards the river. She knew the direction because that is what her father had told her. After two sunrises (when they had finished the sweet rolls he had stuffed in his pockets) he had picked her up and carried her on his back. After a long time — she couldn’t tell how many days it was — they had reached their destination. She had held on tighter as he waded across the river. There was not a star to be seen. He had told her that behind them was China. In front, only another day’s walk was the city of Heung Gong — Hong Kong, the British colony. There they would be safe and the devil could not harm them. In her tiny world, the little girl was certain about two things. First, she could hear her father’s heart beating through his back against her ear. This gave her a sense of security. And second, she could feel the piece of jade in her pocket. She took it out. It felt cold in her palm. The stone was flat and oval shaped somewhat larger than a quail’s egg and smaller than a hen’s. It reminded her of what had happened only days before that had caused them to flee their home. It was like most market days. They were in the village not far from their small patch of farm. Her parents had set up their weekly stall — a table with a cloth over it that reached to the ground. The little girl loved to hide under the table where she could spend all day playing with a straw horse her mother had made for her. From that womblike privacy she could peek through the folds of the tablecloth and see the wide world without being seen, hear without being heard. Her father sold vegetables and her mother took in sewing — that was what the cloth was for, to show samples of her stitching that she did by hand. Her mother was a small woman with a round face just like the little girl’s. And they both had high cheekbones that were red with health. This made her mother appear younger than her twenty-two years because the red bandanna she always wore framed her lively almond- shaped eyes. Around her smooth neck was a matching scarf that was also self-made. These accessories made her mother the butt of jealous barbs from some who lived in this village of hard-working farmers and their wives. But the little girl didn’t care. She knew that her mother was someone special, someone she would like to be when she grew up and became a farmer’s wife herself.

THE BUKOWSKI AGENCY LTD. 14 Prince Arthur Avenue, Suite 202 Toronto, Ontario M5R 1A9 Tel: (416) 928-6728 Fax: (416) 963-9978 e-mail: [email protected] www.bukowskiagency.com