March 28 - April 1, 2007

Dennis Bock, The Communist’s Daughter. (HarperCollins)

DENNIS BOCK’s first book of stories, Olympia, won the 1998 Canadian Authors’ Association Jubilee Award, the inaugural Danuta Gleed Award for best first collection of stories by a Canadian author and the British Betty Trask Award. His first novel, The Ash Garden, was a #1 national bestseller and was shortlisted for the prestigious 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Amazon.com/Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Kiriyama Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (Caribbean and Canada Region). It won the Japan-Canada Literary Award. Dennis Bock lives with his family in Guelph, Ontario.

Saturday, March 31, 2007
Lord Nelson Hotel
730PM

with Noah Richler, Karolyn Smardz Frost, Bruce MacDonald

------------------------------------------------------ Set against the tumultuous backdrop of China’s Communist Revolution in the 1930s, this extraordinary novel brings the legendary Dr. Norman Bethune vividly to life. An eager volunteer with Mao’s Eighth Route Army as it fights against the Japanese invaders, Bethune is the stoic model of heroism as a medical teacher, an organizer of much-needed field

hospitals and a war surgeon operating on countless casualties. But at night, on an ancient typewriter, he composes a long letter to the one person in his life he wishes he had not left behind—the baby daughter he has never met. Haunted by the child’s mother, Kajsa, whom he abandoned during the Spanish Civil War, and faced with imminent death, Bethune must confront the sum of his life.

The Communist’s Daughter is a remarkable story of love and betrayal in a time of war: from the Belgian trenches of the Great War, where Bethune tries to rescue doomed soldiers, to the Spanish Front, where the injured await the bottles of transfusion blood that he transports by car, to the hidden cave in northern China where an elusive Mao steps out of the shadows to meet a remarkable Canadian doctor. Yet the novel is also filled with tender moments, as Bethune paints his lover in Madrid or poses for a photograph with Ho, his young assistant, to celebrate the event of a perfectly boiled egg. Bock’s masterful recreation of Bethune’s indelible voice—proud, quarrelsome, tender, generous—pulls us immediately into a brilliant but anguished mind grappling to reconcile barbaric destruction and individual conscience.

Here is storytelling at its best, a daring, passionate and deeply moving novel that sets the life of one visionary man and the child he strives to love against the forces of history that would drive them apart.