About the
Author
Lori Lansens was a successful screenwriter before she burst onto the literary scene in 2002 with her first novel Rush Home Road. Translated into eight languages and published in eleven countries, Rush Home Road received rave reviews around the world, was a national bestseller in Canada and a Globe 100 Book of the Year. Whoopi Goldberg's production company has optioned the film rights. Born and raised in Chatham, Ontario, where both Rush Home Road and The Girls are set, Lori Lansens now makes her home in California.
Rush Home Road was published in the New Face of Fiction program in 2002.
- Rush Home Road: Nominated for the 2003 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
- Rush Home Road: Nominated for the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book
Praise for The Wife's Tale:
"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."
-Winnipeg Free Press
"A persuasive, dynamic storyteller, Lansens leads us through flashbacks into the world of a lonely, always-hungry child, who grows into a dutiful, anxious, hungry adult."
-The Toronto Star
"[Lansens's] gift, and it's to be cherished, is one of deep engagement with her subject, and empathetic involvement that broadens to draw in the reader."
-The Globe and Mail
"Heartwarming… It's the urgency of this quest, along with Lansens's great capacity for humour and insight, especially as pertaining to the complex world of human emotions, that makes this book so riveting and compelling… Lansens's equation of middle age with a second chance is a cheeringly attractive proposition."
-The Gazette
Praise for The Girls:
"The Girls, the year's best book to come out of Canada, possibly the world. There's deep craft at work here. The Girls communicates astute insights into the art of the memoir and tackles plot development that would sink most other writers. Lansens navigates them effortlessly. Awesome."
-NOW magazine
"I promise: you will never forget this extraordinary story. Love, connection, loyalty, raw humanity and much more are the ingredients of this most unusual novel. Lori Lansens's blend of tragedy and comedy will touch you deeply."
-Isabel Allende
"A stunner… immensely exciting… a tribute to the extraordinariness of human consciousness… laced with delightful comic moments… not just a sophisticated literary accomplishment but a darned good read."
-Toronto Star
"Extraordinary… a masterful and sophisticated duet… a multidimensional vision of the sisters' lives."
-Time Magazine
Praise for Rush Home Road:
"To read Lansens's Rush Home Road is to read Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women coupled with Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel, but as if both novels had been penned by Toni Morrison… In Rush Home Road … an Ontario almost never imagined, a secret, rural black Ontario, a landscape of tobacco, corn and strawberries and a history of struggle and beauty, is given magnificent, complex reality… Lansens is a brilliant talent, with a profound, big-hearted comprehension of human flaws and humane possibilities."
-George Elliot Clarke, The Globe and Mail
"Lansens is a willing storyteller… As a writer, she desires a particular kind of reader, one who wants above all to be transported - who might sit at her knee… immensely readable."
-National Post
"[A] poignant debut….Addy's life - her marriage, her children, her journey to Detroit and back to Canada - is the rich core of a novel also laden with history… This is artfully done."
-Publishers Weekly, March 18, 2002
"While wonderful novels about the black immigrant experience abound in Canada, few novelists, black or white, have written about the country's long-settled black communities. First-time novelist Lori Lansens … does so passionately with Rush Home Road … a compulsively readable book that leaves us feeling we know more about a time and place - and about humankind - than when we opened the cover."
-Quill & Quire advance review
"Rush Home Road is brilliant in its microscopic portrayal of the scent and stench, tears and screams, laughter and joy of black Canadian life in a small southern Ontario town. It draws with pulsating prose the picture of life in the developing 'Negro' societies formed by the proliferation of Canadian stations along the Underground Railway."
-Austin Clarke, author of The Question and The Origin of Waves
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Related
Links
Visit Lori Lansens' website at www.lorilansens.com
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